Thursday, October 10, 2013

Marmalade Splash screens WTF?

It is amazing that a company like Ideaworks3D limited that is the company responsible for the SDK I use to develop my current batch of games with, can have a requirement with the type of license I have, yet fail in the handling of it automatically themselves.

I am talking about the requirement of the community license holders to display the Marmalade splash screen of course at boot up of the game/app. Here it is below so you can see what it looks like.

Quite pretty and normal for this kind of thing, after all the license is only 149 dollars.

The problems come when trying to make sure that this little beaut is up on screen at the correct time, and isn't corrupted in some odd way. I wish I had taken a screenshot of the iPad splash screen last night to show you just how messed up it could be.

There have been many problems with setting up these Splash screens, and they have varied depending on which machine you are trying to get them to work on, as well as which SDK version you happen to be using. So it isn't like Marmalade has not tried to fix these issues, as the way they change per SKD release shows some time has been spent breaking them in different ways. Here are a small sampling/selection of forum posts about these issues. So problems with orientation, of color of placement of scale of corruption and device are all represented in a mixture.

https://devnet.madewithmarmalade.com/questions/14590/mkb-splashios-launch-screens-broken-in-631.html

https://devnet.madewithmarmalade.com/questions/4016/why-i-see-made-with-marmalade-splash-screen-if-i-h.html

https://devnet.madewithmarmalade.com/questions/7212/splash-screen-surface-orientation-on-ios.html

https://devnet.madewithmarmalade.com/questions/2331/cant-get-iwgame-to-show-a-simple-splash-screen.html

I am sure this whole thing is rather annoying to the people at marmalade, who obviously want to get on making the SDK better in more important ways than the simple display of a splash screen at startup.

I have had problem since I changed to the community license because I simply didn't do the splash screen when I owned an Indie license (it was not a requirement). Instead I had a nice image in the credits people could even touch o go to the www.MadeWithMarmalade.com web site. So what to do about the broken splash screens on my iOS devices, well I decided I needed to update to the latest SDK, as I was on 6.2 and the current version is 6.4.1. The upgrade went well enough and about an hour later I had my new versions and indeed the Splash screes were fixed on both my iPod and iPad. Which makes me very happy.

Hopefully this is the start of splash screens working on all devices. from this version on. I can hope along with the community.

Da Voodoochief

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