- May 8, 2012
- 4,334
- 3
Background
In one of the more recent Android beta testing threads (the Dr Dude/Firepower thread) Ryan said the reason why Android hasn't seen the high-resolution (not Textures: High - that's different) table models is because when tested on his available hardware, the tables did not run in a performant manner.
I can confirm that when I was testing this build (the Dr Dude/Firepower) build, Dr Dude was running just fine for me on the TF300T (a Tegra 3 tablet). That early build had the troublesome "curly wires" present in it, which was suggested at the time as being the cause of slow-down on Dr Dude (the large number of polygons required to render the wires was causing a performance hit).
Challenge
With Android, there is always going to be a huge challenge of supporting the 400+ devices that run the operating system, compared to the sub-10 devices that run a variant of iOS (a controlled ecosystem, if you will).
For that reason, if the option of high-resolution tables is being blocked by older devices, is there a way of declaring that high-resolution table models are only supported on devices running a particular minimum spec?
While I'm sure some users with "low end" phones on contract will be screaming and boo-ing at their screens at my suggestion, I don't see any other way of getting this long-overdue feature into the Android release stream. The fact is many android users are playing TPA on tablets that have quite a bit of GPU power (CPU power has been confirmed as not being as important), so the technology should be catching up to the point where TPA can open up this feature.
Proposal
Here is the testing suggestion regarding High Resolution ("HR" from here on in) table models:
Result
The data we collect will assist Ryan in optimizing the code so it runs smoothly on devices with the GPU capability.
Outputs
This will allow Ryan to collect metrics and determine the "minimum" standard for High-Resolution table support.
The minimum standard can be declared in-game as a pop-up dialog (displayed when you activate the feature for the first time).
The dialog can include any Android tools users can employ to verify their device meets the minimum technical requirement.
In one of the more recent Android beta testing threads (the Dr Dude/Firepower thread) Ryan said the reason why Android hasn't seen the high-resolution (not Textures: High - that's different) table models is because when tested on his available hardware, the tables did not run in a performant manner.
I can confirm that when I was testing this build (the Dr Dude/Firepower) build, Dr Dude was running just fine for me on the TF300T (a Tegra 3 tablet). That early build had the troublesome "curly wires" present in it, which was suggested at the time as being the cause of slow-down on Dr Dude (the large number of polygons required to render the wires was causing a performance hit).
Challenge
With Android, there is always going to be a huge challenge of supporting the 400+ devices that run the operating system, compared to the sub-10 devices that run a variant of iOS (a controlled ecosystem, if you will).
For that reason, if the option of high-resolution tables is being blocked by older devices, is there a way of declaring that high-resolution table models are only supported on devices running a particular minimum spec?
While I'm sure some users with "low end" phones on contract will be screaming and boo-ing at their screens at my suggestion, I don't see any other way of getting this long-overdue feature into the Android release stream. The fact is many android users are playing TPA on tablets that have quite a bit of GPU power (CPU power has been confirmed as not being as important), so the technology should be catching up to the point where TPA can open up this feature.
Proposal
Here is the testing suggestion regarding High Resolution ("HR" from here on in) table models:
- Ryan create a Beta build with HR models enabled.
- (if possible) Have a toggle to turn off HR models if your device simply can't handle it.
- Release the beta build to the Android community.
- Android community test the build, but use quantitive measurement values (not just "works fine" or "It's jerky")
- GPU/CPU cycles in the dev options.
- Logcat?
- Some other logging and performance measuring tool Ryan would like us to use.
- Overall opinion of the tables (this can be a subjective report)
- Ryan takes the performance data and uses it to tweak performance.
Result
The data we collect will assist Ryan in optimizing the code so it runs smoothly on devices with the GPU capability.
Outputs
This will allow Ryan to collect metrics and determine the "minimum" standard for High-Resolution table support.
The minimum standard can be declared in-game as a pop-up dialog (displayed when you activate the feature for the first time).
The dialog can include any Android tools users can employ to verify their device meets the minimum technical requirement.
