Hi all.
Having gotten bored with the strategy games on Android (a bunch of which I can’t play anyway, as Norway doesn’t have paying access to the market >:( ), I spent some time during vacation porting Imperium Mini to my phone.
http://www.micabyte.com/android/screenshot.png
It’s a pure 2D, turn-based strategy game on the rise and fall of Rome; an almost direct port of the PC game (also done in Java).
I ran into a bunch of trouble because I tried to build in support for multiple resolutions (medium and high - low resolution just didn’t look good, so I dropped it) since my phone (HTC Magic - Android 1.5) does not support this properly. Another problem was getting the screen to scroll smoothly and keeping the (rather large) background map in memory without running out. I do believe I’ve gotten most of the issues sorted out now, but I would appreciate it anyone with a little time on their hands would help me to test it out. I’m particularly interested in anyone who can test it on the Droid/Milestone or other large screen device.
Here is the link: http://www.micabyte.com/android/imperium.apk (2.6Mb)
It uses internet access and coarse location (for admob).
Here is the manual (also available in-game): http://games.micabyte.com/impmini/manual-android.html
A couple of known issues:
- Manual and About dialogs sometimes do not load the webview on the first attempt. Very irritating problem that I haven’t found a fully satisfactory solution to yet (currently I have a WebViewClient waiting for the loading of the page to complete, but it seems it doesn’t always trigger). Anyone with a good tip on how to deal with this?
- Dismissing dialogs in-game can take a little time. This is because the game is updating the game map, which will often require it to reload (to conserve memory) and redraw a lot of stuff (to allow for smooth scrolling).
An interesting little project to do; in particular, I found it quite interesting to note how what is in fact a very simple strategy game on the PC, easily becomes rather complicated when ported to a mobile device with all the limitations that brings with it (technically, interface wise and in terms of gameplay). But I do like the Android dev kit - just irritating with the 16Mb limitation and the problems of testing on X different combinations of screen sizes and OS versions. Anyone willing to exchange ideas on how to to deal with big bitmaps for a smoothly scrolling screen?
