Is Anyone creating separate versions of their app for tablet and phone?

Tom2012 · October 2015

I'm going to be working on an ipad / tablet version of my game this week.

Rather than try to make one project fit both phone and tablet, I think it will be better to create a separate Gideros project and exported files for tablet.

Has anyone else tried this?

thanks!

Ninjadoodle · October 2015

Hi @Tom2012

I thought about doing this, but decided against it with my current game. It my opinion it will be a pain to maintain two versions. I tried to think of the best ways to make it fit universally.

It depends tho, on what your needs are. What is the game that you are making two versions for?

NatWobble · October 2015

Hi @Tom2012

Wouldn't having two versions also affect your search ranking? I think you'd split all your download stats and rank lower in the app stores.

Tom2012 · October 2015

Thanks for the comments.

I may have to go that route anyway. I'm running my app (Lost Caverns) on the ipad here and the aspect ratio and size of the screen make it look bad.

The buttons are absolutely huge, for example. The other alternative might be to detect if the display is ipad and resize elements on screen accordingly.

I need to 'zoom out' about 25% - sounds tricky.

pie · October 2015

Did you try using gideros autoscaling feature to provide different textures according to the screen resolution?

NatWobble · October 2015

@Tom2012

You could work out whether its a tablet using a combination of the pixel density and actual screen size measurements and then set your logical dimensions larger above a certain threshold when your app starts. This would in effect zoom out. You'd just have to make sure you anchor your GUI elements (by getting the logical top, bottom, left and right values) and if needed multiply the X and Y positions/movements of certain elements by the amount you zoomed out.

As pie says, it would be a good idea to use auto scaling too (providing @2x graphics etc), for the sake of crispness.

The more downloads you get, the more visible your app becomes, so downloads tend to increase exponentially. Splitting your app would really hurt this.

jdbc · October 2015

Thanks for the comments.

I may have to go that route anyway. I'm running my app (Lost Caverns) on the ipad here and the aspect ratio and size of the screen make it look bad.

The buttons are absolutely huge, for example. The other alternative might be to detect if the display is ipad and resize elements on screen accordingly.

I need to 'zoom out' about 25% - sounds tricky.

I always use letterbox to keep the aspect ratio and 2x or big images and setScale(0.5) to adapt to different screen sizes.

Tom2012 · October 2015

Thanks for the help guys.

I've been playing with this and using something like:

if(application:getDeviceHeight()==1024 and application:getDeviceWidth()==768) then
	print("ipad")
	application:setLogicalDimensions(512, 768)
end

Uses the correct assets and 'shrinks' everything down on screen. It's throwing a few things out with fonts but nothing that can't be fixed.

I had no idea we could set the properties from lua!

totebo · October 2015

Same here! Gold dust.

SinisterSoft · October 2015

@Tom2012 - does the deviceid not let you know it's an ipad?

hgy29 · October 2015

I recently had to use the device physical size to make things appear bigger, while keeping the benefit of larger screen space. I computed the diagonal size in inches, instead of relying on the deviceid. Rationale is that bigger the screen is, further from the user's eye it will be...

local scrW=application:getDeviceWidth()
local scrH=application:getDeviceHeight()
local d = math.sqrt(scrW*scrW + scrH*scrH) -- diagonal size in pixels
local resolution = application:getScreenDensity() or 120
local diag = d/resolution -- diag is diagonal size in inches

I then assumed that devices <7" where phones, tablets where between 7" and 12" and desktop over 12".

Tom2012 · October 2015

@SinisterSoft

Good one, didn't think of that!

if(string.sub(application:getDeviceInfo(), 1, 4)=="iPad") then
	application:setLogicalDimensions(512, 768)
end

Tom2012 · October 2015

@hgy29

That's also an excellent idea. Taking my own thread off topic here...

Can I ask something about your code?

local resolution = application:getScreenDensity() or 120

In your example, does this line mean 'if application:getScreenDensity() fails / is nil then use 120'?

Cheers @hgy29

SinisterSoft · November 2015

yes, it's a really nice trick to use for default variables in a function too.

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