Android - Bug Android VER 1.0.6 Bugs

[Nik Barbour]

The cpu heat occurred to me too though was only running at 1ghz.

So switched phone off for 1/2 hour tried again but still a lag fest.

Might try your governor experiment out though! Nice idea man.

 

[neilpinbot]

All tables except CV seem to be running OK on my archos 80 G9 tablet. On CV it,s almost as though the ball is trying to roll over a magnatised table.
Loving the camera 4 it almost looks like I'm stood in front of a real table. And big smiles that on BoP you can now plunge the ball if the camera doesn't go back to the plunger view.

 

[ND3G]

If I am not mistaken, other developers release different versions for different andriod devices. I would much prefer they go that route instead of this 'one size fits all' system. I am using a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 so lag isn't a major issue, but it should look better than the phone version...

 

[Nik Barbour]

If I am not mistaken, other developers release different versions for different andriod devices. I would much prefer they go that route instead of this 'one size fits all' system. I am using a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 so lag isn't a major issue, but it should look better than the phone version...

ND3G:-
Yeah I've seen this too.
Some apps you get a different .apk file dependant on what version of android you've got (the market checks your device type and downloads the relevant .apk).

Dyleck:-
Tried the governor settings experiment without success!
Funnily enough the app worked perfectly again this morning running at 1Ghz HUD on with no lag in any tables, then again after about 10 minutes Lag was back (unless you switch HUD off).
I wondered about cache files filling up, tried clearing the app cache but app manager doesn't give you the option for this app. Did it manually using root explorer, but didn't make any difference.
I think I'm giving up and going back to 1.0.5. (at least until Farsight makes a comment), despite having bought CV & Funhouse. Means living with multiball camera again, but hey at least 1.0.5 was fun to play!

EDIT:- Sorry all, didn't realise how many posts I'd put on this thread about the same problem, till I read back through.
Didn't mean to rant-on!
Just shout 'Shut Up Already' if I do it again!

 

[dyleck]

I think I'm giving up and going back to 1.0.5. (at least until Farsight makes a comment), despite having bought CV & Funhouse. Means living with multiball camera again, but hey at least 1.0.5 was fun to play!

I feel sorry for you. It works reasonably well for me so I will stay with it but agree that fun level dropped significantly. I downgraded market rating of this app to 3 stars until it is fixed.

 

[neilpinbot]

All tables except CV seem to be running OK on my archos 80 G9 tablet. On CV it,s almost as though the ball is trying to roll over a magnatised table.
Loving the camera 4 it almost looks like I'm stood in front of a real table. And big smiles that on BoP you can now plunge the ball if the camera doesn't go back to the plunger view.

Having now had time to play the tables more I need to reevaluate my statement that the other tables are playing smooth, on at least ToM & BoP (the tables I play most) the ball seems to stutter a lot more than before the update with ToM looking the worse than BoP. CV I'm not hardly playing because the ball movement is so poor even with the HUD off.
PS The camera 4 view I'm playing with the tablet held in portrait mode, tried a game in landscape mode and it looks like your looking up the table while your nose is resting on the table between the flippers

 

[Ryan Routon]

Hey Guys! Sorry for the delay, I have been out of town since Thursday night. Thank you in advance for making this thread, you guys are my eyes and ears out there in the wild

A little bit of information for the performance issues, we are in the middle of submission for Amazon's Kindle Fire and due to its hardware I had to do some optimization passes in order to make it playable. In short we tweaked the priority of some of the threads (namely the game thread) in order to get the best performance. We tested the change on a wide variety of devices in house (moto atrix 4g, droid x, xoom, transformer, galaxy nexus, etc) and it seemed to help some and have no effect on the others. Now in retrospect it seems that the tweak hurt some of you guys out there so I am planning on revisiting the problem and we may have to revert back to our original plan. Unfortunately, Android is like no other beast that i have programmed for in the past and every little change seems to help others and hurt others so it is quite a balancing act. Why the game might run great for a while and then not again could be due to the game thread and render thread not getting the love they need (they are both quite hungry beasts when you take all the 3d rendering, physics, and emulation into account). Things running in the background also seem to hurt the performance. Also, just due to the Android OS implementation we have very little control over how many resources we get and every device behaves a bit differently.

The lcd screen lag is something we have been looking into, but its a very difficult engineering problem (Mike would be able to explain it better). In short, in order to tie it into the emulation there are a lot of clock cycles that go into building every little segment and the number of permutations make it impossible to pre-render every possible outcome of the digits. The dmd on the other hand is miles easier (we just turn on or off the dot of the texture as we move along).

For the SD card we are about halfway done and we hope to have an update at some point in the near future where I will try to address your performance issues as well.

As always thank you for your patience and help, it is greatly appreciated.

 

[dyleck]

Now in retrospect it seems that the tweak hurt some of you guys out there so I am planning on revisiting the problem and we may have to revert back to our original plan. Unfortunately, Android is like no other beast that i have programmed for in the past and every little change seems to help others and hurt others so it is quite a balancing act.

Hey Ryan!

Thanks for explanation. I fully understand that Android is much harder to code due to virtually unlimited hardware combination (iOS is much better here). May I suggest to introduce some advanced settings area where you could change the way how the game works? Since it may or may not help some functionality to revert to defaults settings should be there along with clear instruction of what does such settings do. What do you think?

 

[Ryan Routon]

We are actually looking into something similar to this for texture quality allowing people to bump up their graphics, but nothing yet for thread optimization since it is so touchy, I will certainly keep you guys updated though =). Made a few changes that might help, you guys might have been seeing a thread starvation with single core cpu's. At least that is my theory, I have to do some more tests.

 

[Nik Barbour]

Thanks for the explanation Ryan! Glad to hear the performance issues are being addressed, and will look forward to being able to play the new dlc pack.
If you need any testing - be glad to help.

 

[George Klepacz]

@Ryan - You said you tested in house with a Droid X. I have a Droid X and I can't play the game at all now. When the beta was out, it took a slight bit to get to the main menu, but once a table was loaded I didn't have any problems. Each release since has made the game more unplayable for my phone. Are you guys seeing something similar? I haven't downloaded any new apps except for Angry Birds Space since TPA was released.

And a bug I have encountered with 1.0.6 on my Sony Tablet S on both Funhouse and Cirqus Voltaire (haven't played the other tables to see if this happens on them) the main music sometimes keeps playing over other music so you eventually have two sets of the theme playing at once. I don't know how to repeat this bug, but it happens a lot for me. This happened in the Beta too, but was fixed when you guys first released it publicly.

 

[PiN WiZ]

Ryan, are you planning on fixing the awkward clicking noise you hear when the magnets on the tables are activated. The sound is especially annoying when the ringmaster is rising on Cirqus Voltaire. I understand performance issues take precedence, but just wanted to know if you're planning on fixing this issue as well.

 

[Ryan Routon]

@Pin The clicking noise shouldn't be an Android specific issue (nothing I put in personally anyhow) but I will look into this. We did have our sound guy say the mechanical sfx was too high in some cases.

@George I will have to take a look at the sound issue, but yes the Droid X is on my desk right now (its my personal phone actually lol). Things load extra slow on this model due to the hardware, and the LCD tables (BoP and FH) will not run at all with the hud up, but apart from that it runs. Perhaps you are also seeing thread starvation issue, but anyhow this model has always been on the low end of the spectrum and I have used it as a testcase for performance testing. I just made some changes that should fix the slow loading you and I would see on this phone however (the ad support was causing a slowdown in some cases). Are you saying none of the tables are now playable?

@Nik thanks Nik =) all of you are a huge help, Android is much like the wild west out there.

 

[PiN WiZ]

@Pin The clicking noise shouldn't be an Android specific issue (nothing I put in personally anyhow) but I will look into this. We did have our sound guy say the mechanical sfx was too high in some cases.

@George I will have to take a look at the sound issue, but yes the Droid X is on my desk right now (its my personal phone actually lol). Things load extra slow on this model due to the hardware, and the LCD tables (BoP and FH) will not run at all with the hud up, but apart from that it runs. Perhaps you are also seeing thread starvation issue, but anyhow this model has always been on the low end of the spectrum and I have used it as a testcase for performance testing. I just made some changes that should fix the slow loading you and I would see on this phone however (the ad support was causing a slowdown in some cases). Are you saying none of the tables are now playable?

@Nik thanks Nik =) all of you are a huge help, Android is much like the wild west out there.

The clicking noise issue began when you guys implemented the ball drop sound. This issue is currently not present on consoles since the ball drop sound hasn't been implemented yet. I hope this bug doesn't show up on the next DLC update for consoles.

 

[George Klepacz]

Ryan, I just opened the program again and while it took a very long time (where my phone gave me a Sorry, Pinball Arcade is not responding, Force Close, Wait, Etc. Message) I just waited and it finally opened. I guess I just need a lot more patience. Thanks for the reply.

 

[jaredmorgs]

I've got a different method:

1. Start the game and let it force close (usually happens now on the latest version, although could be my combination of processor overclocking and lulzactive governor).
2. Give it a few moments, then restart the game from the home screen.
3. Start the game again (usually starts fine).
4. Start a HUD game like BoP or Funhouse.
5. Exit the game gracefully back to the Android Home Screen.
6. Start the game again and select the same table, and the lag issues largely disappear (maybe a little bit of lag persists when there is lots of lights during a gameplay event).

My guess (and this is a guess only) is that the correct amount of GPU memory is allocated to the app given the conditions of last play, so if you restart quickly the GPU/RAM/CPU settings remain semi-persistent.

I have definitely noticed some regressions in performance. I might try going back to the "stock" ondemand govenor and seeing if that results in more reliabity.

For me, I found that the game force closes with the custom ROM I'm using (see my user info). When I start the game up the second time, I get lag on the table I selected. I then close the app by exiting out back to the home screen.

 

[jaredmorgs]

We are actually looking into something similar to this for texture quality allowing people to bump up their graphics, but nothing yet for thread optimization since it is so touchy, I will certainly keep you guys updated though =). Made a few changes that might help, you guys might have been seeing a thread starvation with single core cpu's. At least that is my theory, I have to do some more tests.

With the Android fragmentation out there, I think we owe it to you guys to help out with testing. Maybe identifying some of these more invasive bugs on a range of HW before release might curb the flow of bugs post-release. It might give you the heads-up you need to nip the issues in the bud before release.

Some might disagree and expect a perfect product when they are paying money. I think that's a pipe dream given the amount of devices TPA is slated to work on. I work for an open source company, and I'm used to the "put out what you want to get back" philisophy.

I think any of us on this forum would be glad (actually, thrilled) to get builds of TPA to test for you.

I would gladly put my hand up to test (I do beta testing for 10tons on a purely volunteer, no money changing hands basis). Even if alpha/beta versions of DLC were part of this beta testing engagement, I would *still* keep paying my $5 / month just to support the mammoth effort your team is putting in to looking after mobile markets.

 

[PiN WiZ]

With the Android fragmentation out there, I think we owe it to you guys to help out with testing. Maybe identifying some of these more invasive bugs on a range of HW before release might curb the flow of bugs post-release. It might give you the heads-up you need to nip the issues in the bud before release.

Some might disagree and expect a perfect product when they are paying money. I think that's a pipe dream given the amount of devices TPA is slated to work on. I work for an open source company, and I'm used to the "put out what you want to get back" philisophy.

I think any of us on this forum would be glad (actually, thrilled) to get builds of TPA to test for you.

I would gladly put my hand up to test (I do beta testing for 10tons on a purely volunteer, no money changing hands basis). Even if alpha/beta versions of DLC were part of this beta testing engagement, I would *still* keep paying my $5 / month just to support the mammoth effort your team is putting in to looking after mobile markets.

I hear you jaredmorgs...Ryan, I know it may not be up to you, but you guys at FarSight really need to think about having us help you out with beta testing tables and updates for the Android. There are way too many devices out there for you to fully test out before you submit an update. I know you've said before that you guys would test out optimization tweaks on devices you guys had laying around the office, but performance tweaks really need to be thoroughly tested on a wide variety of devices before you know for sure if your tweaks and fixes are really making progress and how they affect different devices. This would only be possible by you guys at FarSight allowing us to help in beta testing and you wouldn't even have to pay a penny to any of us to do so. Remember Ryan, we're all here to help out and it would be our pleasure to help you guys put out a more complete and stable product.

 

[sendll]

I hear you jaredmorgs...Ryan, I know it may not be up to you, but you guys at FarSight really need to think about having us help you out with beta testing tables and updates for the Android. There are way too many devices out there for you to fully test out before you submit an update. I know you've said before that you guys would test out optimization tweaks on devices you guys had laying around the office, but performance tweaks really need to be thoroughly tested on a wide variety of devices before you know for sure if your tweaks and fixes are really making progress and how they affect different devices. This would only be possible by you guys at FarSight allowing us to help in beta testing and you wouldn't even have to pay a penny to any of us to do so. Remember Ryan, we're all here to help out and it would be our pleasure to help you guys put out a more complete and stable product.

I agree with the above. I'd be glad to help you out for bêta testing builds on my galaxy note if you need to.
On my device the performance tweaks didn't help at all. Like I said before, there is more lag than ever.
Great to know you are actively working on this issue.

 

[McGuirk]

On Funhouse and CV, I've had the table music playing twice, at the same time. One song will be farther along than the next, but you hear the table playing the song twice. Sometimes with Funhouse, it will be the general table music, along with the 11:45 music, depending on your status on the table.

Funhouse sometimes will play fine for me with the HUD on, it just seems like a crap shoot. I was not expecting this phone to be one that would lag, nor did I expect it to be because of the new HUD settings.