Marmalade #6 - iAd issue, Kindle Fire

It has been a fairly busy couple of days. I really thought that the iOs version of the game would be good to go by now. Unfortunately there have been a bunch of unforseen issues. So i will discuss them, and then go on to describe my Kindle Fire and dev for that device.

iPhone version is not ready yet...
1. On wednesday i worked with me mate Paul for quite some time, maybe 2 hours in total. Doing a few things, but majorly trying to solve the iAd crash issue. Every time an iAd was served it crashed the game, or it did 9 times out of 10. After some debugging i traced it to a problem with the IwGxSwapBuffers() call. And this did not match the example that did work. So once i was armed with this i decided to attack the forums, information in hand. Well now i new know to search for i discovered a bunch of threads on this subject. One o fthe main ones mentioned there had recently been a fix (this fix had taken a startling 6 or 7 months to obtain, OUCH!!!!) with the latest update to version 5.2. Sweet!

2. So Paul tried to update the Mac to 5.2 and had issues, which he eventually traced to the fact he needed an update for XCode as well. Simple enough... only... he is still struggling to get the thing downloading to his iPhone and working correctly since all these re-installs. What a palarvor and what a mess. I hope to resolve this really fast and get our game into submission asap.

Meanwhile back at my ranch (ok, my house in the suburbs).
1. I had tried to get the download to my Android tablet (Kindle Fire) working on Tuesday only to be foiled by who knows what. Shortly after that my KF was nabbed by the wife to play 'Where's my water', and i have hardly seen the machine since. Anyway my mate in Utah grabbed my code from my subversion repository and grabbed a version of Marmalade and then built and ran it on his Android phone. that weas very exciting of course, and he showed me it working via skype.

2. Friday turned up and i stole my Kindle Fire back. I had done a bit of research and it seemed that the JDK that i used was broken (it was the latest version 7). The advice was to go back to version 6 update whatever. so firstly i asked my mate to send my his built APK file to try  and see if i could put that on my Kindle. I used dropbox and once it showed up the install went flawlessly and Whamo, i had the game on my device. WOOHOO!

3. Next up was to build my own, so a quick uninstall of jsk7 and then find the jdk6u29 version and install. so far so good. It did not work, i was bummed. It was having issues locating the jarsigner and so i new it was my install that was somehow missing. It then dawned on me that i had provided an environment variable for JAVA_HOME and so went and changed that to the new JDK directory.

4. It worked.. It had ben building but not deploying. Now i can deploy and install or even run it directly. This has allowed me to play the game on a real touch screen device and not just in a simulator. I am very excited and the only thing stopping me getting the Android version published is I need an advertising extension.

As you can see, i faced a number of trials and still do most likely. But i am hopeful that the approval system for the iPhone app will go through fast and without a rejection once we get the thing working again.

I am sure there will be more coming soon :)
G'night
Da Voodoochief

ps. one last note!  I added a nice icon to the build and now on my Kindle fire desktop i can see the HotChicks Icon, it is cool and very exciting!