Andor's Trail

Hello fellow ATers,

I'm starting to mess around with android SDK to better understand how AT runs. I'll be using the Eclipse ADT bundle provided by google rather than Android Studio, as I have a lot of experience with Eclipse.

I just managed to start AT in debug mode in the emulator for the first time, as described in the wiki page, but I won't do it again this way : 30 min to boot the emulator, 15 min to upload and install AT apk, and a whooping 8 hours to finish the initial "loading resources" for a new game.... plus everything is very slow (more than 10 seconds between clicking to move and to opening of Mikhail's dialog).

I then started using intel's x86 system-image, without HAXM (not allowed to install it on that comp), and it was amazingly faster ! From emulator start (using snapshot) to AT game started in debugger : 35 mins.
Less than 5 minutes for a normal, non-debugger-attached start.

So I was wondering what you guys use to run the test/debug builds of AT ? Your device(s), x86 emulator with/without HAXM/KVM, the standard ARM emulator, another third-party android emulator ?
Wouldn't it be worth updating the wiki page to include some info on that point ?

I gave up debugging on emulators a LONG time ago.

I can't stand waiting hours to see how a minor tweak I make turns out. Testing is best on the actual device; more realistic (interaction etc.) and less time consuming.

But as far as emulators, have you tried out Genymotion? It works with VB and it's still beta but looks like a good prospect. I've only tried it out a couple of times after a friend told me about it but if really necessary it would be a good go-to emulator.

I have encountered this, too. I remember that Oskar suggested as solution to use debugging with your phone while having it connected it with your pc.
Read this tutorial to set your device up:
http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html

I hope this faster for you.

Well, I was reluctant to connect my Galaxy S3 to debug, especially as I play AT often on it, and also use it for many things WHILE coding on AT.
However, using the debugger on the emulator was becoming way too painful, and my poor old core i3 couldn't handle it well.

So, I dug up my old brave (crappy) Galaxy Spica, from Android 1.5 era, updated to 2.1, to replace the poor emulator.

It worked like magic !

In normal run mode, time between compiler start, and actual game display went down from 6 minutes to less than one (using the debug data).
In debugger mode, it went from 15 minutes to about one...

This means my spica is not going back to retirement box anytime soon !

To anyone thinking about running an android dev kit : find a device and drop the emulator. ANY device is strong enough to run AT (I think there are not many that are worse than the spica), and if you can get one for a few bucks, it's worth spending to save time. Time is money after all !

It's great that this is a lot easier for you!