• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

'Dillo Hills [Development]

Another problem begins when you pass from zone 4 to zone 5, the game stutters and when it comes back to run well, you appears dead. Also the battery consumption is them extremely high. I'll hope that you can fix these bugs. Thanks for all
 
Seemed to run ok on my htc desire 2.2 on low settings but had to uninstall because it took up far too much memory (around 16M if you include air). Wouldn't install to sd card either.

Seemed a good game though.
 
Great job FEX! Runs almost iphone like on low settings.. If I put the settings higher and i get armadillo lags!

This is on a Froyo Fascinate. Superclean ROM.
 
This is something that I'm going to repeat again even after beta tests I've been included in to.
25-30fps is not smooth and definitely not as butter. 50-60fps is smooth as butter anything below is average.

What on earth made you put that delay on screen touch fex? Sorry but for such a fast game there should not be any delay. Have you ever played call of duty or battlefield? Imagine that game with delay when you press fire.

Zone 6 is a mistake. I loose every time on it just because hills are not high enough to gain speed... one mistake and you're out....
Try to make a game in native android code
 
What on earth made you put that delay on screen touch fex?

The input lag is obviously not intentional.

It has actually been a very frustrating bug to track down, and I have been asking around on support forums to see if it is some kind of known issue with AIR, to no avail.
 
For anyone who might be curious, here is the performance data we have collected so far:

dillohillsreports.jpg


Thanks so much to everyone who has played the game and offered their feedback so far. At the top of my to-do list:

1) More optimizations to rendering code, trying to get the game running more smoothly on more devices
2) Maintain game state while application is minimized (when checking texts, etc.)
3) Add volume settings to options menu, not just pause menu
 
Interesting data. It's weird how the Inspire and Desire HD are the exact same phone yet Inspire has better performance..

btw really hope you consider coding the game in native android sdk. It's the only to really get rid of all these performance problems. There are plenty of much more demanding games that run at much more steady framerates than this game sadly. Im guessing Adobe Air is another reason why this game RAPES battery :(

You might want to consider vector graphics for all images also because they can get quite pixelated when zooming in. Also like someone else mentioned earlier.. i think it would be ideal if the armadillo never leaves the screen. Rather than showing a bubble and an arrow telling us where he is when it's out of view, just make the camera zoom out some more.

With that said, im looking forward to more updates!
 
i think it would be ideal if the armadillo never leaves the screen. Rather than showing a bubble and an arrow telling us where he is when it's out of view, just make the camera zoom out some more.

Although I haven't played the game (my poor phone wouldn't be able to cope), I agree. I've played similarish games, and it's very hard to judge distance/angle/speed once the character goes off the screen.
 
btw really hope you consider coding the game in native android sdk. It's the only to really get rid of all these performance problems.

I want to be careful about blaming AIR too much, because I'm sure that there are lot of ways that I could still optimize things to work better even in AIR. After all, my background is primarily in Flash development, and developing for mobile is still very new to me, so this has been a learning experience from the start!

With that said, I would definitely like to learn native code, and once I know it, port this game over and see if the performance improves. This is something that I won't exactly be able to just pick up overnight - I would essentially learning a brand new programming language - but it's also something that I know is very important and will help future games (and even this game, if I'm able to convert everything) to perform much better.

I am also going to continue monitoring the performance data to see if I can pinpoint specifically where the problems are. There are definitely some strange trends that I was not expecting.

For instance, I would expect the Droid X to be much higher on the list, since it's a moderately new (~7 months) phone with pretty good specs, yet it has been consistently performing poorly.

Another unusual trend I'm seeing is that the Galaxy S appears to run the game very well, but then it crashes out of nowhere unless played on Low settings. This suggests a memory leak, but it's very unusual to see a memory leak that only affects one device (typically, if your code is leaky, it will leak on all devices, not just one).
 
I don't know if there is a proper place to file bug reports anywhere, but since fex is active here, this will probably do :)

Device:
Samsung Galaxy S, Android 2.2 FroYo stock

Problem description:
When the phone lags significantly (finds new WiFi network, or something else that's outside this game's control), there are many glitches in gameplay. This includes (but is not limited to)
- the dillo rolling through diamonds without picking them up
- the dillo dropping through birds without bouncing
- the dillo suddenly flying at super-speeds when the last thing I saw was a hard crash into a hill

Analysis/guesswork:
I think this is because the game mechanics is tied to each displayed frame. I'm guessing the game loop considers a time delta (now_timestamp - last_frame_timestamp) for every frame rendered, and calculates new positions from there, does collision detection etc. Now, this works fine as long as framerate is reasonably steady, but once you have a very big delta, stuff gets missed, and things like passing through solid objects happen.

Proposed solutions:
option 1)
Make sure that the game "catches up" on several internal "game mechanic" frames without rendering if the time delta is too large between frames.

option 2)
If the time delta between frames is too large, make sure to "readjust" the game accordingly. Basically forcing a "pause" in the game, and subtracting from the elapsed game timer



Other than that, I really enjoy the game :)

It's annoying to have to play on low details on my Galaxy S to avoid crashes, but I'm sure you'll be able to fix that.
 
Tried playing free version on my droid 2 global. Seemed like changing the settings to low did not help, game seemed to randomly skip while playing. I was able to progress further by just letting the dillo roll and me giving no input as pressing either part of the screen just led to the dill slamming into the ground ("ouch"). I did not realize there was a setting in the pause menu to turn off sound so I will try that to see if it improves preformance.

Overall it looks like it should be a fun game but currently I opted not to rate it on the market as 1* ratings do little to help the dev. I'm kind of disappointed due to this game not running as well as I had anticipated, my hardware should be more than capable, however I understand this is Fex's first mobile platform game and is still working on the game.
 
@tags: You pretty much nailed the delta issue on the head. I was planning on doing #2 this evening. :D
 
Can someone please explain to me why everytime I type in dillo hills in to the search bar on the market on my xperia x10 mini all I get is thay stupid annoying orange soundboard ?
 
Can you bind the space bar or some keyboard button tu jump and fly? I want to tray to play with a bluetooth Wii controller!

ThX!
 
I'm sorry for flamming but I've been dying for this app and I can't even get it on my LG Vortex please make it compatible. Me and my frriends have vortexs And cnt play
 
Wow who knew my HTC Inspire 4G was such the powerhouse? I don't have any issues running the game on high res. I think the game is nicely done. I have not played Tiny Wings more than a couple times so I don't have a comparison between the two. As it stands on it's own it's a great time waster, which all phones games have to be to be successful.

Couple things I have noticed

- Zone 4 = really hard to beat if you make one mistake. Perhaps ramp the difficulty down a tad to make the overall flow/gameplay/difficulty matchup a bit better.

- Move the ad placement from top center to top right. When the ads obscure action on the screen (like the little text bubbles that popped up first time playing) it's a design failure in my eyes. Otherwise a full screen ad after dying with a skip button ( Like the words with friends system ) would also take care of the issue. The dillio seems to stay pretty central in relation to the screen and having the ad placed there as well clutters it up too much.

- Easter eggs & powerups. Bouncing two or three birds in a row should light something up, flash the screen, light my dillo on fire, etc. You've crafted a good game. Give me a reason other than high score to keep coming back and reward me for trying different things outside of the main mechanics. A trophy case would work well. Number of shrooms hit in one playthrough would make me dip down and hit that difficult shroom rather than gliding by the next three hills.

Keep up the good work. Sorry for the longish post. Just putting my thoughts out there.

Greg
 
I overclocked my Desire HD to 1.5Ghz and set the CPU governor to Performance and almost all the lag is gone on high settings :D Only problem is the battery usage :/ but that's expected.

One other piece of feedback. Dunno if anyone has noticed, but the way the camera seems to zoom in and out depending on how high you go can get pretty choppy at times. It's not down to performance, because even when the game is playing smoothly, the camera doesnt zoom smoothly and evenly. I hope you understand what i mean Fex. That is one thing Tiny Wings excels at and is really needed for your game imo.
 
Does anyone else have a Sont Ericsson Xperia X10i? I can't find Dillo Hills on the market and it wont download on the online app store, god this is horrible, i need this game! Please help!
 
Back
Top Bottom