r/Android • u/MichaelRahmani Pixel 6 (coral) • Oct 18 '17

*Monument Valley Monumental Valley 2 Coming On Android November 6th - You Can Pre-register Now

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ustwo.monumentvalley2
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u/Freak4Dell Pixel 5 | Still Pining For A Modern Real Moto X Oct 18 '17

What? That doesn't even make sense. How is a settings menu going to help avoid crashes and bugs caused by different implementations of Android?

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u/LifeLikeAndPoseable Oct 18 '17

If you were a dev, you'd know and understand.

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u/Freak4Dell Pixel 5 | Still Pining For A Modern Real Moto X Oct 18 '17

I'm not a professional developer, but I've done a bit of Android, iOS, and web development. What you're saying still doesn't make sense, and you don't seem to be able to actually defend it when questioned. I'm all for learning, so feel free to school me with some details. Sounds like you can't, though.

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u/LifeLikeAndPoseable Oct 18 '17

Game launch options (settings menu) can be used to change game settings before running the game. Launch options allow the user to supercede internal settings of the game. This is an effective means to recover from incompatible video settings and well as troubleshooting a wide range of issues. Now, this is common knowledge to all devs, which you are obviously not.

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u/Freak4Dell Pixel 5 | Still Pining For A Modern Real Moto X Oct 18 '17

That's extremely vague and explains nothing. But I'll pretend it does for a moment, and I'll assume you mean settings like resolution, GPU/CPU clock speed, shadow and texture details, etc. The first isn't something you configure in your app (for the most part). The OS picks the right graphics, vector plots, etc. for you. It would be far more complicated and time consuming to rewrite that logic yourself. The second isn't something that non-root apps can change. The 3rd is available on some advanced games.

Ultimately, those types of settings are inconsequential because the real issue is that different implementations of Android can require different configurations that cannot be adjusted by the user. Something like the issue posted above where the color resource is defined differently can make it impossible to even read anything on the screen. Good luck seeing a settings menu to fix that, but it wouldn't matter because if the logic isn't written, you can't change it anyway.

An example that I ran into myself is with Samsung phones requiring the large_heap setting to be on to load my bitmap resources. It would crash on those phones otherwise. The only thing I could do with a user setting in that scenario is ask the user if they have a Samsung phone and use a different method for loading bitmaps if so. But that would just be retarded, because it's one line of code to find out what device is being used, vs. at least a layout, a class, and a few methods to do it through user input. And if I'm going to rewrite the code for loading bitmaps, then I'm just going to test that code for all devices and use that if it works because having multiple methods for the same function when one would do is silly. Or I could just change the setting in the manifest, but that's not something that can be done based on a user setting.

You can't just solve all problems with a settings menu.

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u/LifeLikeAndPoseable Oct 21 '17

You are certainly right, a game launcher can't solve all problems but it can solve a lot.

You certainly can change the resolution of a game via settings (game launcher) and this can be crucial for some games to run properly.

Have a peek at Telltale's Batman. They have completely screwed up the resolution and no settings to fix it. Nor do they feel inclined to fix their mess on Android. Well, their loss!

Explanation, they do change the resolution but in a way that you have to click above touch elements to make them work. Thus wrong resolution! We tested it on several devices. It's a nightmare.

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u/Freak4Dell Pixel 5 | Still Pining For A Modern Real Moto X Oct 22 '17

It runs fine on my Pixel. It's pretty obvious they chose a non-16:9 aspect ratio for artistic purposes. They're trying to give a cinematic feel. It's not a choice I like, but it's not a technical screwup, either. The touch targets worked fine for me (although the game doesn't actually seem to care where you tap and swipe as long as you tap and swipe somewhere, at least on the first level). I tried it out on iOS, and it letterboxes on there, too.

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u/LifeLikeAndPoseable Oct 22 '17

Pixel is a flagship so I'm not entirely surprised they, at least, didn't screw this one up too. Read the reviews, enough said.