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/