Android Development Best Practicies

[Shabadage]

Hey guys, I think a list of tips and tricks aka best practices guide would be a huge help to a lot of people around here about avoiding some of the quirks of the Android Exporter. Just little tips or things that you know that would be useful to someone else.

1. The runtime doesn't handle creating lots of objects at once well. It's better to create everything you need first, then move them/deactivate them as you need to, instead of creating and destroying. I personally have been upwards of 500 objects at once with half of them runtime scaling and remained at a rock solid FPS on a medium tiered device.

2. Have a white border around your game and can't figure out why? Try changing the level color to Black.

Share your tips!

[Bree]

Good idea

Sounds can be a little finicky exporting to Android. Once in awhile an .ogg file that will play on windows fine but won't play on Android. Sometimes I can fix it by changing the bit rate using Audacity when exporting the file. Not always though! If you export the file in Audacity to .ogg go to options at the bottom of the save window. From there you can choose different rates, I find that 2 & 3 seem to work, nothing higher than that though. This is just from me playing around with it, nothing official.

Another thing is be careful with playing 2 loops on the same channel. That won't work. If you have a background sound looping on channel 1, for example, and then another one that goes off at certain intervals on channel 1 it might not play. It's best to put anything you plan on looping on it's own channels to avoid problems. I usually will put my short sound effects on a channel on it's own as long as I know they don't interrupt each other.

Checking Uninterruptable on sounds seems like a good idea at first until you start adding tons of sounds and you realize some stuff isn't playing. If you check that it closes the channel for that sound until it's done. I wouldn't recommend using that option, using other channels seems to be a better way to go. Unless you truly want to shut the channel off for that sound, then go for it