Android Game Working On All Screen Sizes

I'm trying to specify the art sizes for an Android game with ~10 screens. I want the game to run on API 8+, and on all size screens except 'small'. Since we're using API 8, I use

Solution 1:

Resurrecting the dead (thread): one way of doing things could be to provide just one set of bitmaps and do the scaling yourself. You can either provide large bitmaps and scale them down, or provide middle of the road bitmaps and scale them up (for large screens) and down (for smaller sizes).

The benefits of the former are that your art looks great on large screens and you are a bit more future proof (if you provide for this in your code). The downside is that you could (and actually likely will) run into Out Of Memory/Exceeding VM errors when decoding/loading these bitmaps on lower-end devices, even when doing it carefully. So I usually go for the second approach.

Scaling up can be done a number of ways, but one is to just load in the bmp at it's default size (use getResources().openRawResource(id) or BitmapFactory.decodeResource(etc) or even better use inputstreams or [according to some the best method] load/create using the FileDescriptor methods) and then scale it either by creating another bmp using createScaledBitmap() or if drawing to a canvas draw it to a destination Rectangle (better memory wise). For scaling down you can either use BitmapOptions like .inScaled or, again, use a smaller destination Rect in your canvas drawcall.

Doing it this way is way better and (for a game) faster than letting Android scale for you using those buckets (hdpi etc) and uses less memory if done right.

But beware as some bitmap loading methods are a bit buggy and create 'the bmp is too big for the VM' errors. Also learn to dispose of your bmps properly; a lot of people and Google/Googlers say Android does this and you don't have to set your bmps to null and recycle() them, but so far I've found that you do. Another caveat is to set the proper options (filtering/antialiasing etc) to prevent blurry bmps. And take care of un-optimal color/format/dpi settings on BitmapOptions/canvasses/SurfaceViews and even windows.

There's much more, but this should help anyone get started.