1
\$\begingroup\$

I'm working on an Android port of an iOS game at the moment. I am using the Android NDK only (android_native_app_glue) in Eclipse (CDT + ADT). I am using the Android emulator, API 15 (but we are targeting API9+) as we do not yet have an Android device. The game has about 200-300mb of assets and I'm unsure of how to include them properly or how to get into a fast testing/debugging cycle with assets attached.

As it stands I am linking the assets folder in my Android project to the resources folder that contains the game assets. This works but the problem lies in the fact that when I build it takes about 9-10 minutes for the 200mb .apk file to be installed onto the emulator. This is simply unacceptable when things need to be tested quickly.

If I strip the assets out of the project, it installs very quickly. Because of this I am stripping out the bulk of the assets at the moment to do my testing but when it comes to the long run I need a better solution.

My question, is there a way to setup an Android game project with a large asset collection during development to allow for fast testing/iteration? E,g. fast deployment or updating of .apk to allow for quick testing.

Improve this question
\$\endgroup\$

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4
\$\begingroup\$

If your assets don't change frequently, then upload the the assets to some folder on sdcard. Then read your assets from there.

And if you assets change, you can easily make small script/batch file that uploads only modified files. Then run this script each time before running your app.

Improve this answer
\$\endgroup\$
1
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks, this worked well although the actual uploading of the files took a long time (1 hour). Also the code to access resources from the /mnt/sdcard instead of the Native Asset Manager changes things quite a bit. That said, it helped me get things up, running and testing things quickly. The only negative is that being an OpenGL application it runs horribly on the emulator so waiting for that elusive Android device... \$\endgroup\$
    – Christian
    May 21, 2012 at 8:29

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .