Thinking about some RPG..Android version.

[fireside]

That's a good idea.  You could probably use it to restore health or add abilities also.

[EgonOlsen]

I'm still working on some loose ends. I've added a sign posts that should help you to find the right path. If you touch them, a message appears that tells you the direction. But if you are able to read these signs by touching them, the same has to work for the signs that are attached to shops and tavern...so I added this as well. I also added a new sound for the wilderness, a kind of bee humming.

However, the biggest issue was performance on my new Nexus 5X in dungeons. Because the GPU governor (the part of the OS that takes care of the GPU's clock frequency) thinks that it's a good idea to clock the GPU down to 180Mhz in dungeons after some seconds for whatever reason (it doesn't do this in the wilderness). There's no way to change this, so I had to increase performance in some other ways. My worst case was a dungeon that consists of many small rooms...I got ~17fps on my shiny new device in parts of this dungeon.

So I optimized jPCT-AE's light calculations as well as the dungeon rendering process of the game and I'm now at ~26fps at the exact same spot with no visual impact at all.

While I was profiling the engine's code, I found out that the multiplyMM()-method from the Android SDK actually sucks:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/opengl/Matrix.html (I can't link directly to it because the forum won't let me)

It's in native code, so it should be fast. And maybe it is, but the overhead of calling it hurts it more than it helps. I replaced my calls to it with my own, Java based implementation and it's 4 times as fast on Android 6/Nexus 5X and even 5 times faster on the Note 1 with it's trusty Dalvik VM. This method has to date back to the early days, where the VM was so slow that going native here made sense...but not today anymore.

[Thomas.]

When I worked on the game I had in my todo list something like "change lighting model depending on the object and pixel distance". But I am not sure if this is applicable for long triangles...

My Galaxy S6 has the same problem in GPU governor. But I think that if the GPU temperature increases, governor decreases its frequency. So you get full GPU power of your device only for maybe one minute. Excellent.

Are you using native display resolution? On S6 is pointless all higher than 1440x900.

[EgonOlsen]

Yes, i'm using the native resolution.

You are right about the temperature. If I rest the phone on the cooling pad, it works better. However, this doesn't happen in some other 3D demos that I've tried (They happily render at 600Mhz all the time) nor in the wilderness.
My guess is that the GPU clocks down if there's no huge workload in the form of a hugh mesh. In the wilderness, I have the terrain, which is quite large but in the dungeon, there's no such thing. All the drawcalls only draw rather small objects, which might lead the governor into thinking that it's a good time to clock down.

[Thomas.]

It is very strange, because this governor fails exactly in these situations. Nice lighting model, post effects, but device is running at 20fps, because is underclocked...

[EgonOlsen]

I had to do an additional title graphics for the Play Store, so I bought some stuff (I was lucky, because the background image that I bought has been uploaded only recently) on the web and tweaked and combined it as good as I could. The end result won't win any prices, but it's good enough, I guess. So I decided to use it as the new loading image as well, because I was never really satisfied with the former one. Here it is:



And about the state of the project: All that's left now is actually the Play Store icon. I'm still waiting for it to be finished. Once that's done, the game will go public.

[Thomas.]

Image is really good and much better than the first one. For icon may be used knight from this image.

[EgonOlsen]

Thanks! The icon will be done by a co-worker of mine. But I guess he's a kind of perfectionist, so he takes his time...

[fireside]

I like it, but it might give the impression it's a 2d game.   You'll probably be able to show some in game shots, also?

[EgonOlsen]

Sure. Google play has a section for screen shots as well.

[EgonOlsen]

The game now has an icon for Google Play and such...



Edit: I also changed the title screen slightly to have this icon as the shield's emblem (see some posts above...).

[fireside]

That's kind of what I had in mind when I suggested one beside the title on the other opening screen.  Did you try it, or don't you think it would work?  I think a larger view in front of the title, or possibly centered below it,  would look good as a sort of game symbol.  It looks cool on the shield, but I think it could be used in both places. 

[EgonOlsen]

I tried it, but it looked a bit stuffed to me, so I decided against it for now. I'm sure there's a way to do it properly for somebody with more artistic skills...anyway, if the world keeps turning, tomorrow will be the day where I'll press the "publish" button on Google Play and hope for the best...

[Irony]

I am actually pretty excited to hear that! We'll help to spread the word 

[EgonOlsen]

It's out, so let's continue here: http://www.jpct.net/forum2/index.php/topic,4615.0.html