Adobe AIR Development

[johnhattan]

Okay, so I got Dice-A-Rama Deluxe (a game) working fine in the simulator. Uploaded it to the store. App is approved. And the first thing I get are two zero-star reviews from people saying that the game crashes on load. Just bought and tested it on the hardware (2.0 beta), and sure enough, I get a blank white screen and the theme music, but no game.

So I pulled it back down immediately.

Two questions:

1. Anyone know why this would be happening in a Flash/AIR app? I have a dozen games up on Playbook and this is the first I've seen of it.

2. Anyone know why RIM would approve the game if it didn't work?

[Zymatic]

I don't know if this is the cause for you but I experienced a similar issue with my app. The cause of the white screen for me was a permissions issue. If the user chose not to allow the permissions my app was asking for, the white screen would appear when my app tried to do something that needed the permissions.  In my case it was the access_shared permission I believe that was causing the problem.  I just added a check to see if I could access the shared folder and if it couldn't I was able to handle it accordingly by displaying a message to the user and continuing the app.

Hope that helps.

Zymatic

[johnhattan]

Nope, that's not the problem. Only permission I use is internet, and I don't use that at the beginning. Is the white screen a crash? Far as I know, the app is running, as the background music is playing.

[JohnPinkerton]

The code you have, have you ran it on the hardware in debug mode? Sounds like something is failing to load and hanging the app.

[johnhattan]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to finally cable the thing up. First time I've had a problem that manifests in hardware but not on the emulator.

And I'm still very surprised that they approved it.

[johnhattan]

Okay, I'm now debugging on the device and I'm no closer. I'm seeing the following (OS 2.0 beta):

1. blank white screen for 10-20 seconds, and then app closes

2. blank white screen for 10-20 seconds, and then main menu comes up and game behaves normally

Still no idea why it's doing this. I've noticed a new "white screen" delay starting up apps on Playbook, but nothing this long. Anyone else seeing anything like this?

[elena_laskavaia]

How many files in the bar file?

[johnhattan]

Five on the command line

descriptor_playbook.xml -- AIR descriptor

blackberry-tablet.xml -- BB descriptor

dicearamadeluxe.swf -- the game, about 492k

icon_086x086.png -- icon

Default.png -- splash screen (which isn't showing, but I haven't gotten that far yet)

Here's the command line.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Research In Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-1.1.0\bin"\blackberry-airpackager -devMode -package dicearamadeluxe.bar descriptor_playbook.xml dicearamadeluxe.swf icon_086x086.png Default.png blackberry-tablet.xml -password XXXXXXX -flexsdk "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\AirSDK" 

[johnhattan · Accepted solution]

Okay, looks like I found it. Took a whole day of commenting out code, as it wouldn't manifest anywhere but on a hardware playbook.

Problem was in my high score object, which stores small bits of data in Flash SharedObjects (which, in AIR, map to whatever local non-shared storage the device cas). Dice-A-Rama Deluxe has 20 scoring categories, with up to 99 sores in each category. I hadn't been seeing any trouble on other platforms, but it looks like looking for that many SharedObjects on Playbook was slowing up the works enough that Playbook was assuming the app was crashed and was killing it.

I rewrote the high score object to grab scores as-needed rather than all at once, and that seems to have fixed the delay.

[Lampei]

Glad you figured it out.  Why did you choose to use the shared object rather than the SQLite dB?  Just wondering...