Marmalade #2 How i struggled

New SDKs are always trouble. There are so many things ya don't really know about how it is structured. Whether things are capitalized or not etc.

So i had several issues. None of which were really to do with the instal process. Here are the first three issues and what i did about them.

1. The Simulator ran the Debug text Hello world version no problem. YAY! But when i tried to run the GX version the simulator would just crash in a nasty locking way. what the heck was going off? After an hour or so of trying a number of things i went to the forums for help. there is a lot of info in those Marmalade forums i have to say. I very quickly located a thread(or several :O) that mentioned this kind of graphical driver issue. One fix that was mentioned was to copy my DLLs down a directory from the Quallcom one. Well It worked, or mostly. I still have an assert when i run the samples, but at least they all work. YAY!

2. After playing with the samples for a bit i decided it was time to do some coding. So i got going and was going well till i needed a texture loaded so i could manipulate it on screen. Dang.. now this little problem took me a long time to fix i have to admit. In fact it took me approximately 4 hours to solve this one. The simplist tasks it turns out can stop most anyone. This time i was stopped as i could not decifer where to put my assets for my project. Now i would make a suggestion here that the MBK file comes with it's assorted option segments already defined but empty. Anyway i found the answer on the first place anyone should visit after installing Marmalade (www.drmop.com). I was reading his how to training segments using marmalade and i saw how he added a texture. It is simplicity itself, adding an assets segment to your MBK file. Bah! so much wasted time.... Manipulating the texture has been very easy though :)

3. I never expected to say this but... I had some difficulty with my C++ coding. It's true. It has been quite some time since i last actually coded in C++ and boy does it show. It was taking me waaaayyy too much time to come up with a good conversion for certain classes or data initializations etc from C# to C++. Of course now i have spent a few days hacking away it is all coming back to me. Only issue is the code i have already converted and written may need to be redone. I really thought the conversion was gonna be a doddle. It has not been, but it is getting easier.

So far i have very high hopes for Marmalade. My conversion is coming along well and although there are several things not yet hooked up. I am expecting the game to be up and running by the end of this week.

Next Blog post I will discuss more about working with Marmalade itself.

thanks again to www.DrMop.com

Da Voodoochief

ps. yes, i also realise that getting to know any SDK takes time. With Marmalade i hope to cut my time in half from learning both Android and IOs.