Android port efforts

[Jordach]

I get a decent 20fps on my cheap, no name tablet. I had all the settings on wtih Android 4.0.4.

Other than that, we need a chat button.

[stu]

Minetest fails to run on my android, either freezes up on the blue screen, or crashes if I touch the screen just after the app opens.

I think trying to optimize minetest for this junk I have will not be worth it.

Too bad, however, if the game is loading there may be a chance a future version will not crash.
just out of interest, what version of android are you running?

debug.apk runs pretty nice on Androidx86 on a hybrid tablet. 15fps with all settings on lowest.
The tablet has 2gb ram, a low-end intel graphics card and a dual core cpu.

Glad to hear it works at least, though I would have expected a slightly better framerate on something like that.
Are you testing in single or multi player mode?

I get a decent 20fps on my cheap, no name tablet. I had all the settings on wtih Android 4.0.4.

Other than that, we need a chat button.

Sounds similar to what I have, do you have it rooted?

VanessaE: The apk extracted and worked fine under 4.1.2 in the emulator so it's not something specific to that.
Looking again at your LogCat output, this seems to be the problem here

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

E/AndroidRuntime( 1952): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{org.minetest/android.app.NativeActivity}: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to find native library: Minetest


Can you tell me exactly how you installed the apk?
If you didn't already then try using adb install -r Minetest-debug.apk (do not change the name)

Also, if you happen to have an existing directory called minetest in your sdcard root then you MUST delete or rename it.

[VanessaE]

I installed the apk via the "Apkinstaller" that came with the tablet, which I assume is some standard Android utility for this purpose (about the only other thing I can find about it is that its version is 2.9.40.07). There is no existing minetest dir in /sdcard (in fact, there *still* isn't :-) ).

Meanwhile, you should not assume the install must always go to /sdcard, you should ask the user where to install it, if possible, as Minetest of course needs to be able to store large quantities of data. Reason I say that is that the user's mobile device may not have their preferred/high-capacity storage on /sdcard (my tablet puts it at /mnt/external_sd for example).

[hoodedice]

It's a custom Android 2.3.9 based off cyanogenmod, but has newer, better hardware drivers.

[stu]

I installed the apk via the "Apkinstaller" that came with the tablet, which I assume is some standard Android utility for this purpose (about the only other thing I can find about it is that its version is 2.9.40.07). There is no existing minetest dir in /sdcard (in fact, there *still* isn't :-) ).

Perhaps the "Apkinstaller" does something different to adb, I have no way of knowing. All I can suggest is you try adb.

Meanwhile, you should not assume the install must always go to /sdcard, you should ask the user where to install it, if possible, as Minetest of course needs to be able to store large quantities of data. Reason I say that is that the user's mobile device may not have their preferred/high-capacity storage on /sdcard (my tablet puts it at /mnt/external_sd for example).

I realize the install assumptions are not perfect but It does need to default to somewhere. I am trying desperately to keep this a purely native app, the last thing I want to do is add some horrible java front-end asking you where to install.
I would much rather add a user path override setting in minetest.conf, then users would be responsible for moving the default files to the new location. Besides, I don't see storage being much an issue on most modern media, unless you create a very big map in singleplayer or try to run a server.

What I will do is auto name the default directory to minetest_1 etc if a minetest directory already exists.

Thanks for the update.

[VanessaE]

I get the same failure with xyz's and sfan5's test builds, whether they are installed through "apkinstaller" or via adb as you suggested. The files from sfan5's build (with the minetest dir manually copied to /sdcard) look like this, once installed:

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Z3xNJxbc

I post this because I expect yours is similar (but I've already since removed it).

The device is rooted and has SwitchMe installed, perhaps these change the way top level of /data works?

[Jordach]

Re: Rooting my device?

Stu, that's a no.

[Splizard]

Glad to hear it works at least, though I would have expected a slightly better framerate on something like that.
Are you testing in single or multi player mode?

Singleplayer, the framerate is only slightly worse then the desktop version on that device.

[Sokomine]

This works amazingly well! I've dested this version in singleplayer and on servers with small media data (VanessaEs vanilla server, Redcrabs server). The view distance is admittedly low on my rather cheap phone - yet 20 blocks are usually enough for small houses, and it runs smoother than the desktop version did on my old integrated graphics.

Starting a new singleplayer world took several minutes. Guess that's due to the slow CPU and nothing to complain about. Connecting to servers is more than fast enough.

The client even managed to connect to VanessaEs survival server! At least to a degree. It took several attemts, i had to hit "wait" when the app didn't react like 20 times (until media was downloaded), fps where at about 1-3, and it crashed pretty soon (probably case of ran out of memory). With a server with that many mods installed, it's no big surprise. It's rather a surprise that it worked at all :-) Players with better phones/tablets might have success even there.

The keybord problem is a bit annoying as it seems necessary to return to the home screen shortly and then go back to the game in order to get rid of the keyboard. The controls as such work fine, although I personally find it a bit difficult to steer that way. Other people seem to have way less trouble with it. Would it be possible to use the direction sensors of the phone/tablet as a replacement for the mouse? That might make control a lot easier. Most of the time, going/running forward is enough. If the client could only continue to walk forward until a stop-button was touched, that'd be even greater! And very useful on the desktop version as well.

Having a way to type in chat messages, to open the chatlog (F12), perhaps F2 (hide chat so that some formspecs can be operated), controls for sending "/spawn" and "/status" to the server and a disconnect-button might be great as well. Not beeing able to chat is the biggest remaining issue.

So: Great work! Please work a bit on the controls (especially chat; if possible, sensors for mouse control and some addidtional buttons). The game itshelf runs very fine already.

[sfan5]

Would it be possible to use the direction sensors of the phone/tablet as a replacement for the mouse? That might make control a lot easier.

Imagine you are sitting in a train, you won't have much luck with using the movement sensors for controlling.

[Novacain]

(until media was downloaded),

I assume this means you can't select a setting for "preload item visuals"? also, does it start with shaders, or anything like that?

[stu]

Some minor updates.

Made it possible to close the soft-keyboard
Added a simple chat mechanism

Note: These should be considered as workarounds until better solutions are found.

The apk file has been updated: debug.apk

You will need to delete your sdcard/minetest directory if you are updating a previous installation.

VanessaE: I made a slight change to the manifest that may (or may not) help in your case. Please let know the outcome if you try it.
Note: This change is only in the current debug.apk and has not yet been pushed to the repo.

Cheers.

[VanessaE]

After resetting my tablet to factory defaults, rooting it, re-installing my usual set of apps (but without SwitchMe), I re-tried sfan5's build (because it was handy), which failed as previously described. I uninstalled it, removed the minetest data dir, and installed your above debug.apk like so:

[spoiler="Show install command..."]
vanessa@rainbird:~$ sudo /opt/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20131030/sdk/platform-tools/adb install Minetest-debug.apk
[sudo] password for vanessa:
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
4953 KB/s (8346523 bytes in 1.645s)
pkg: /data/local/tmp/Minetest-debug.apk
Success
[/spoiler]
As you can see, it went in clean, or so thinks adb anyway. I then went to the tablet's ":::" menu, dragged the "Minetest" icon to my usual page on the home screen, and tapped it, which crashed with a "Minetest has stopped" dialog right away. Logcat shows the same sort of error as before:
[spoiler="show error output..."]
I/ActivityManager( 264): START {act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] flg=0x10200000 cmp=org.minetest/android.app.NativeActivity bnds=[524,407][596,479] u=0} from pid 467
D/AudioHardware( 90): AudioHardware pcm playback is exiting standby.
D/AudioHardware( 90): openPcmOut_l() mPcmOpenCnt: 0
D/dalvikvm( 1653): Late-enabling CheckJNI
I/ActivityManager( 264): Start proc org.minetest for activity org.minetest/android.app.NativeActivity: pid=1653 uid=10068 gids={3003, 1028, 1015}
I/dalvikvm( 1653): Turning on JNI app bug workarounds for target SDK version 9...
D/AndroidRuntime( 1653): Shutting down VM
W/dalvikvm( 1653): threadid=1: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x4137b300)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): FATAL EXCEPTION: main
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{org.minetest/android.app.NativeActivity}: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to find native library: Minetest
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2059)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2084)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$600(ActivityThread.java:130)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1195)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4745)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:511)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:786)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:553)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to find native library: Minetest
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.NativeActivity.onCreate(NativeActivity.java:195)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:5008)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1079)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2023)
E/AndroidRuntime( 1653): ... 11 more
W/ActivityManager( 264): Force finishing activity org.minetest/android.app.NativeActivity
[/spoiler]
Here's what got installed, and where:
[spoiler="Show `find` output..."]
vanessa@rainbird:~$ sudo /opt/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20131030/sdk/platform-tools/adb shell
root@android:/ # find / |grep -i minetest
/data/app/org.minetest-1.apk
/data/dalvik-cache/data@app@org.minetest-1.apk@classes.dex
/data/data/org.minetest
/data/data/org.minetest/cache
/data/data/org.minetest/cache/com.android.renderscript.cache
/data/data/org.minetest/lib
/data/data/org.minetest/lib/gdbserver
/data/data/org.minetest/lib/libMinetest.so
[/spoiler]
I did a quick check online last night after my last try with sfan5's build, the "hardware" mentioned below is the "Cortex A9" variant of the ARMv7 processor. Seems a lot of developers have trouble with this particular chipset in multiple tablets.
[spoiler="show processor info..."]
root@android:/ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 431.85
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x3
CPU part : 0xc09
CPU revision : 0

Hardware : RK2928board
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000
[/spoiler]
The Buildcraft APK as obtained from the Playstarz website installs, starts, and is able to join the simpler servers just fine on this tablet. It'll eventually crash on anything more complex than my Nostalgia server, and the fps sucks, but it DOES run. I attribute those issues to bugs in the engine, inefficient memory management, and inability to turn off things like shaders and preloading of item visuals, etc.

[stu]

As you can see, it went in clean, or so thinks adb anyway. I then clicked the icon on the tablet, which still crashes right away, before showing the menu. Logcat shows the same sort of error as before.

Thanks for the update. I have read reports that setting android:hasCode true in manifest can sometimes fix this error.
That really should not be so and is clearly not the problem in your case, at least we can rule that one out.
If buildcraft works then I am confident there will be a way to make this work

[VanessaE]

Yeah when I was researching this last night (well, early this morning, my time) that's what I was finding as well, though obviously it doesn't apply here. The only other thing I came up with was that app authors often have to build for several common processor types and package them together because tablets often fail to correctly report what kind of processor (or variant thereof) they *really* contain.

But, as I told sfan5 last night, this is Android and I don't know wtf I'm doing here. :-)

[spillz]

I tried debug.apk on a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (phone) and Asus MemoPad HD 7 (mediatek chip)

Things worked surprisingly well on my Note 2. I could play both single player and connect to a server on my LAN. Got anywhere between 20 and 50 fps, and a draw distance of up to 50 nodes (if I am interpreting correctly). Issues:

1. The first time you start minetest it just hangs. I killed the process and restarted a couple of times. Could be its just doing a lot of one time initialization.
2. Back button doesn't get you to the menu
3. I found that unless I was actively moving my finger on the screen holding the onscreen move/interact buttons would stop working. (i.e. the screen needed constant input signals, it wasn't enough to hold the finger over a button)
4. The position of the jump button makes it almost impossible to move and jump at the same time. Would be much nicer if jump was on the other hand (minecraft PE has the center position to jump and it's really hard to use too)
5. Hiding keyboard issue (I just held the home button and went back to the app to make it disappear)
6. No fly, fast, chat controls

The MemoPad struggled a lot more. More like 7 to 20 fps and lower draw distance. Also the controls did not display at all. (But the inventory controls did appear.) It also exhibited all of the issues above.

I started following stu's github repo, and would like to try out building the sources myself and contribute a patch or two if I am able. I have a decent amount of C/C++ programming experience and familiarity with a lot of open source stuff, but android SDK/NDK is relatively new to me as is Irrlicht, so it would be a bit of a learning curve. Tips on building if I have trouble would be appreciated.

[stormchaser3000]

OK how on earth do I install this

[stormchaser3000]

i can' run it it crashes on start up

[spillz]

i can' run it it crashes on start up

What hardware? Did you try launching a few times?

[stormchaser3000]

i have a proscan non rooted and yes i launched it like twice

[sfan5]

i have a proscan

Be more specific!

[stormchaser3000]

i have a proscan

Be more specific!

ok but i don't know the specs of my system just a sec i will look it up

[stormchaser3000]

ok i think this is it: Proscan 7-Inch Tablet with Google Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, 1.2GHz Processor(appearently it goes slow as the dickens),

[spillz]

I checked out stu's github code onto my Ubuntu 13.10 AMD64 box. (I used openjdk-7 instead of 6 but followed most other instructions in build/android/README.txt.)

First issue: I get the following error message running build.sh:

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

>> Applying irrlicht.patch
patching file include/IEventReceiver.h
patching file source/Irrlicht/Android/CIrrDeviceAndroid.cpp
Hunk #2 succeeded at 274 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 284 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #4 succeeded at 293 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #5 FAILED at 292.
1 out of 5 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file source/Irrlicht/Android/CIrrDeviceAndroid.cpp.rej


It's still compiling, so we'll see...

EDIT: Now I get

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

>> Building Minetest
Gdbserver      : [arm-linux-androideabi-4.6] libs/armeabi/gdbserver
Install        : libMinetest.so => libs/armeabi/libMinetest.so
Gdbsetup       : libs/armeabi/gdb.setup
Buildfile: [...]/minetest/build/android/build.xml

BUILD FAILED
[...]/minetest/build/android/build.xml:13: sdk.dir is missing. Make sure to generate local.properties using 'android update project' or to inject it through the ANDROID_HOME environment variable.


I skipped the ADB step in the README, but followed everything else. Is running 'android update project' the right fix?

EDIT: NO, just had to define ANDROID_HOME env var.

Now I'm stuck at

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

[mergemanifest] Manifest merger disabled. Using project manifest only.
     [echo] Handling aidl files...
     [aidl] No AIDL files to compile.
     [echo] ----------
     [echo] Handling RenderScript files...
     [echo] ----------
     [echo] Handling Resources...
     [aapt] Generating resource IDs...
     [aapt] [...]/android-sdk-linux/build-tools/19.0.1/aapt: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory


EDIT: Which I solved with

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

apt-get install lib32stdc++6


And now I apparently have successfully built the APK and I can load it into an Android 4.1 Nexus 7 emulator session. Unfortunately segfaults on the emulator. A problem for another day... (I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the failed patch application -- there was quite a bit of code there)

EDIT: Here's some logcat

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

V/Minetest(  762): Using system-wide paths (NOT RUN_IN_PLACE)
V/Minetest(  762): getting exe path
V/Minetest(  762): dstream
V/Minetest(  762): done
V/Minetest(  762): dstream
V/Minetest(  762): WARNING: system-wide share not found at "
V/Minetest(  762): /system/bin/../share/minetest
V/Minetest(  762): "
V/Minetest(  762): WARNING: system-wide share not found at "
V/Minetest(  762): /system/bin/..
V/Minetest(  762): "
V/Minetest(  762): something something minetest
V/Minetest(  762): /sdcard/minetest
F/libc    (  762): Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at 0x0000000c (code=1), thread 775 (org.minetest)
[snip]
I/DEBUG   (   33): backtrace:
I/DEBUG   (   33):     #00  pc 0072d16c  /data/data/org.minetest/lib/libMinetest.so (__sfvwrite+28)
I/DEBUG   (   33):     #01  pc 0073120c  /data/data/org.minetest/lib/libMinetest.so (fwrite+76)
I/DEBUG   (   33):     #02  pc 00370f18  /data/data/org.minetest/lib/libMinetest.so (porting::copyAssetDirectory(AAssetManager*, std::string)+480)



EDIT: OOH dopey error, forgot to add SD Card storage to the emulator. Now it runs but the result is a garbled menu (maybe OpenGL emulation in the emulator) that I can't interact with. None of the interaction works (probably the broken patch...) when I install to my phone, but at least the menus render correctly. I'm bowing out for tonight.

Sorry for the monologue, but maybe its useful to someone.

[hoodedice]

i have a proscan

Be more specific!

ok but i don't know the specs of my system just a sec i will look it up

Rockchip Single Core 1.2 GHz Cortex A-8 ARM v7
Vivante GC800 OpenGL 3.0/2.0
512 MB DDR3 SDRAM

Google is your friend.

[stu]

I checked out stu's github code onto my Ubuntu 13.10 AMD64 box. (I used openjdk-7 instead of 6 but followed most other instructions in build/android/README.txt.)

First issue: I get the following error message running build.sh:

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

>> Applying irrlicht.patch
patching file include/IEventReceiver.h
patching file source/Irrlicht/Android/CIrrDeviceAndroid.cpp
Hunk #2 succeeded at 274 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 284 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #4 succeeded at 293 (offset 13 lines).
Hunk #5 FAILED at 292.
1 out of 5 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file source/Irrlicht/Android/CIrrDeviceAndroid.cpp.rej


Same problem here with the current svn sources, try using the pre-patched sources from here instead.

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

cd deps
rm -r irrlicht
git clone https://github.com/freeminer/irrlicht-android.git irrlicht


Works for me ;-)

[spillz]

Same problem here with the current svn sources, try using the pre-patched sources from here instead.

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

cd deps
rm -r irrlicht
git clone https://github.com/freeminer/irrlicht-android.git irrlicht


Works for me ;-)

Thx. I will try that. Anything that I can help with such as testing or features? I was going to try tweaking controls initially. Getting sound working is probably beyond me.

[stu]

Same problem here with the current svn sources, try using the pre-patched sources from here instead.

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

cd deps
rm -r irrlicht
git clone https://github.com/freeminer/irrlicht-android.git irrlicht


Works for me ;-)

Thx. I will try that. Anything that I can help with such as testing or features? I was going to try tweaking controls initially. Getting sound working is probably beyond me.

You could try cherry picking some of the updates from the freeminer android branch (which this was originally based on)
My biggest problem right now is lack of native debugging (android issue: 58373)

Re. sound, I have been looking at the following two repos, though Ive not really had time to try anything yet.

https://github.com/AerialX/openal-soft-android
https://github.com/vincentjames501/libvorbis-libogg-android

[Sokomine]

The new version works very well with the chat button - the keyboard can also be removed again without going back to the main screen first. All that's left to do there might be some additional controls (chat history, perhaps screenshot).

Unfortionately, fps have dropped compared to the first version. Now, I get around 1 fps at VanessaEs Vanilla server at spawn and can barely move there. Other areas are less problematic. Similar fps drops have occoured on the much more complex servers in the past with older versions of the desktop version. Even in other situations, fps now seem to be more around 20.

[stu]

Unfortionately, fps have dropped compared to the first version. Now, I get around 1 fps at VanessaEs Vanilla server at spawn and can barely move there. Other areas are less problematic. Similar fps drops have occoured on the much more complex servers in the past with older versions of the desktop version. Even in other situations, fps now seem to be more around 20.

I don't think anything added recently should cause a drop in fps but then I was kinda thinking the same myself...
The only thing it can be, If anything, is the soft-keyboard workaround. I think, in future, the hide button should only be redirected for effected versions. Those using 4.1 or 4.2 will just have to use the home or recent apps button trick to get rid of the keyboard.

Edit: You could try restarting your device, for some reason that seems to help for me. (possibly leaking memory somewhere?)

Edit: Here is an experimental build using xyz's irrlicht fork and without the soft-keyboard patch

Removed! It was bugged anyway.

Note that hiding the keyboard will cause the app to crash under android versions 4.1 and 4.2