Gavin Pugh - A Videogame Programming Blog

It’s been a while!

I’ve been pretty busy in recent months. Some of the press about Neversoft last month may give some clues. I’ve been sitting on a new vs-android for a very long time now, which contains some nice improvements. Unfortunately I just never got a block of time together, to finish it up for a release.

As well as it seemingly always stuck at the top of my “TODO” list, what also prompted me to get it done was a breaking update in the r8b NDK. Google like to move around their directory layout, and rename things from time to time. The latest NDK also added support for GCC 4.6, as well as the MIPS architecture toolchain. So I implemented functionality in vs-android for all of that.

vs-android – Working For Free

I must admit I grow weary of working on vs-android. After I put in the work for a release, I pretty much don’t want to see it again for at least a few months. Whenever I get email alerts on the Wiki pages, with people commenting – the answers to the questions posed are usually right there on the “Troubleshooting” wiki. There’s a number of good folks who do great bug reports, and even have little patches to fix or improve vs-android. That’s all fantastic, but they’re unfortunately in very much the minority.

I think a product like vs-android is immediately attractive to people who might have tinkered a little with C++ in Visual Studio, and want a ‘quick-start’ into Android programming. If you follow the instructions, and have a little bit of initiative, you can pretty much have all that. It’s tiring though to hand-hold people through “Android Programming 101”; I gave up on that many months ago. I do this project in my free time, and I shouldn’t be spending more free time supporting the lazy. In one instance recently I actually had someone call me at work, he looked up Neversoft’s number off the internet and went through the switchboard. He wanted to know if “vs-android worked with the Express version of Visual Studio”. Quite a cheeky bastard!

That said, I do intend to keep working on it. I still use it myself for another pet project I have at home, so rest assured that it’ll be kept up to date for the foreseeable future. I just wanted to vent a little!

v0.94 Changes

Here’s a list of the changes made in the v0.94 revision:

• Completely reworked the deploy and run portions of vs-android.
• Deploy has its own configuration pane: “Android Deployment”, and saves these settings to the .user file.
• The Deployment process in general is much more robust. “Build->Cancel” also now works correctly when deploying.
• “Build->Deploy Solution/Deploy Project” now works on Android APK projects, to simply run the deploy step. Enable the “Deploy” checkbox for your project in the Solution “Configuration Manager” to enable this.
• You can now run a deployed app by using “Debug->Run” (F5)! It’s a bit of a hacky method, but appears to work fine.
• NDK r8b was a breaking change for vs-android. This version now requires r8b or newer to be installed.
• Fixed breaking changes to the location of libstdc++ STL libraries.
• Fix for Google breaking change to x86 paths: “i686-android-linux” -> “i686-linux-android”.
• Added support for the new GCC 4.6 toolchains.
• Added support for the new MIPS toolchains.
• Tested and hopefully fixed issues such that vs-android works fully with a 64-bit JDK install.
• Fix to make it possible to build projects in paths that contain spaces. Thanks to ‘null77’.
• Added ‘Forced Include File’ to “C/C++ -> Advanced” property sheet. Thanks to ‘danfilner’.
• Fix to make sure ARM5/ARM7 GCC flags are passed correctly to the compiler. Thanks to ‘Drew Dunlop’.

You can get the latest vs-android here:

• http://code.google.com/p/vs-android/