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How stable is allegro 5 on android ?
dhia hassen
Member #16,240
March 2016

i think i want to switch my game engine from sdl2 to allegro 5 , but that engine can export on android too , so i have to make sure first that allegro 5 is now stable on android , im asking , how stable is allegro on android ? can i trust it for a serious project ! ???

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

It is rather stable (but use latest git for some fixes). And there are some general restrictions. At the very least you will have to handle ALLEGRO_EVENT_DISPLAY_HALT_DRAWING and make sure you support touch input. You'll also want to take extra care to limit memory and CPU consumption (especially while your app is backgrounded). On Android a game can never quit, it just gets backgrounded - but will sit in the background for months and if you're not careful still drain battery. Also, the way Allegro is set up on Android you will need to use a tiny bit of Java for initialization.

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
avatar

Elias said:

It is rather stable

What about the mouse emulation api? That's marked unstable. Are there plans to remove it? I mean, it's not hard to turn a touch begin, move, end into a mouse down, axes, up event so it doesn't really matter I guess.

EDIT
Oh, what about apps running in the background. Is there some event to let you know when your app is in the background so you can idle it?

dhia hassen
Member #16,240
March 2016

Yes there is a way to do that , using one on these i think :
ALLEGRO_EVENT_DISPLAY_SWITCH_OUT
ALLEGRO_EVENT_DISPLAY_LOST
probably the first one , at least on SDL2 it is SDL_WINDOWEVENT_MAXIMIZED ..

but now the problem is that building allegro 5 for android on windows is hell , i think i can do it , but i won't do it for myself , i want to write a build script for this purpose for the comuity , is anyone interrested in this ? cuz probably i will need help

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

I have a Python script to build for Android in Linux. But it needs some cleaning up, and it only supports png, ttf and ogg for now. I plan on putting it up on github shortly though.

Ok, it is done:

https://github.com/liballeg/android

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

dhia hassen
Member #16,240
March 2016

Now i have downloaded android studio , and i have SDK / JDK ... all setup , so how to use allegro from this point , i found that link useful from github ( https://github.com/liballeg/android ) , but i think that it assumes that you have a precompiled libraries of allegro for android , where can i found those , if not , what to do then ? and thanks

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

Android Studio will download them for you, all you need is this one line in your build.gradle:

compile 'org.liballeg:allegro5-release:5.2.0.0'

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Polybios
Member #12,293
October 2010

Wow, that's cool, thanks! :D

dhia hassen
Member #16,240
March 2016

i reported an issue on github ( here https://github.com/liballeg/android/issues/1 ) please check it and answer me

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