Posted October 15, 2020 by Lights Out Games
Another day, another build. Here’s what you have to look forward to in version 20.10.15.1759:
I’ve been focused on ports to new platforms for the last couple weeks, which is why things have been slow. Unfortunately, while Xbox seems to be almost done, I’ve hit an issue I’m not sure how to fix.
With Xbox stalled, I shifted focus to mobile. I mentioned doing some NVDA-related TTS work recently. Part of that also involved performance optimization. Essentially, one place in the Android build needed to determine when speech was done before advancing the game (I speak an initial message telling users to turn off their screen reader, and don’t start the game until the message is done.) My initial method for achieving this was having the game loop check whether speech synthesis was done. Unfortunately, this happened roughly 60 times per second, and I suspected it was killing performance on mobile. I then set about adding support in the TTS library for callbacks when speech utterances were finished, and making that support available to the engine.
It does seem to have improved performance, which is the good news. The bad news is that, for me and my ancient version of Android at least, some of the controls are off. In particular, my Xbox controller has LT and RT reversed. LT fires, while RT switches focus modes. Can’t say whether the same happens with a PS4 controller, because my phone’s bluetooth stack is so bad that it won’t even pair with another controller.
This release publishes what I’d consider to be an alpha Android build. If you use Android, I’d appreciate a bit of testing. I’m not going to give elaborate directions, but essentially:
adb install onslaught.apk
should do it.Would appreciate input on a) whether the controls are reversed and b) how performance is. I’m still working on an iOS port, but since Android is what I know best, I thought I’d finish that port first.
Thanks and enjoy.