“After long and painful discussions in the Game Oven office, we made the tough decision to delaying the launch of Bounden on Android,” Eline Muijres reports via the Game Oven blog.
“In the Vine (video below) are 7 devices all running the same compass app (ironically named Steady Compass) on Android. Yet, all compasses indicate that North is somewhere else,” Muijres reports. “Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with electromagnetic fields confusing the compass; it has everything to do with the diversity of hardware inside these devices.”
“We have been developing Bounden for Android alongside its development on iOS, and have tested the game on a number of devices,” Eline reports. “It was only a week ago that we started expanding our list of test devices, after we quickly discovered that: a) some devices had ‘broken’ gyroscopes that didn’t work on all axis, b) that some devices were faking gyroscopes by mixing and matching the accelerometer data with compass data, or c) that some devices did not have a gyroscope at all.”
“These are all major problems for our heavily gyroscope-precision based game. We weren’t just testing on low tier devices, by the way. Popular devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4 are problematic as well. We’re not the only ones though – after posting the Vine, we got an enormous amount of response from other developers recognizing the problem. For the user, buying an Android phone means you can choose between hundreds of different devices and pick the one that fits you best. For developers, the fragmentation on Android is frustrating: you can develop an app for one phone, but you can never be sure it will work on another Android device as well,” Muijres reports. “Releasing Bounden on these devices would be catastrophic.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Forget for a moment about broken or non-existing gyroscopes, the fact that some outfits go so far as to attempt to fake them tells you all you need to know about the shiteous cesspool that is Android.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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