Publishing Google Play Store experience

Rickyngk

Dear all,
This is the first time I try to work with Google Play store, but unfortunately I've got some troubles with device resolution. There's no compatibility method for grouping devices by resolution. They only demand on "screen size" - physical screen size in inches, and "density". I think that method is good for application only, not for game, which based on programmatic rendering.

I also thought about dynamic loading data package depends on device resolution (and/or density) runtime (offline- which leads to huge data size, or online - which takes cost for storage and down stream )

Thank you in advance for any help you provide !

phongtt

We are experimenting with the "download specific data pack" solution. Anyone has any other advice?

phongtt

No one has alternative idea to share?

Ok, this is our take on the approach. Stay tuned for Game42 on Google Play next week

Platypus

@PhongTT, that looks like an excellent solution, but not if you have to host it yourself. Can all assets (data packs) be uploaded to Google's servers?

Will Apple adopt this method soon too? [They're not already doing it, are they?] My app requires multiple enormous sets of images (tailored to the screens of the iPad Retina, iPad Classic, iPad Mini, iPhone4+ and iPhone3GS-). A universal app would be so big that many people wouldn't have enough space for it on their devices UNLESS a single asset pack was (were) automatically preselected for each device prior to downloading/installation.

fxone

@phongtt It's only idea I've not implemented yet this one:
1. make 4 versions of apk according to different screen sizes: from small to xlarge and determine it in AndroidManifest.xml!
2. then make 6 versions of texture packers AND scenes (lua files) for logical view at gideros project according to different types of aspect ratio for android device screens: a) 5:4 = 1.25 b) 4:3 = ~1.3 c) 3:2 = 1.5 d) 16:10 = 1.6 e) 5:3 = ~1.6 f) 16:9 = ~1.7 based on

local ratio= application:getDeviceHeight()/application:getDeviceWidth()

and determine it in main.lua!
this is one thing what I could share

phongtt

@Platypus:
Thanks Currently we host the data on our server. Afaik, there's something like Google server like you said but we haven't tried it yet.
For iOS side, I'm not sure about Apple but I know there are games that downloading big data from their server, especially Gameloft's ones as they could be 500MB-1GB.

@fxone:
Thanks. I'll let @Rickyngk evaluate that