HTC, GSON, and ProGuard

 Dev Notes, Neil Rajah  No Responses »
May 022012
 

I might have figured out what’s going on. There’s a bug discussed here that may be what I’m running into. Basically, it appears that some newer HTC phones ship with the GSON library already installed. So when my game comes along and tries to call an obfuscated GSON method name, it looks for that method in the pre-installed library instead, and doesn’t find it. Or something like that… I don’t fully understand how Java handles ‘system libraries’, and some people seem to be having this problem even without using ProGuard. Anyway, the linked thread suggests some workarounds, which I can try.

This is one of the most commonly occurring errors with the latest version of Neil Rajah. The other one has to do with a null pointer exception in my code when dealing with Swarm logins. That’s the next issue on my list to investigate.

How I messed up with ProGuard, and how Swarm saved my a**

 Dev Notes, Neil Rajah  No Responses »
Apr 262012
 

Neil Rajah is the first project where I tried to use ProGuard. The initial setup took some trial and error, but some Google searches mostly sorted that out. I had entries in the config file for libGDX, Mobclix, Flurry, most of the important libraries that I use. The game’s been out for a month, and no one’s really reported major problems.

I’ve always had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that maybe my game is crashing all over the place, and I’m just not getting to know about it. But ACRA was working, I got crash reports when I was debugging the game, so I put that down as paranoia. I never got any ACRA crash reports from the field, and didn’t really give that much thought. You can probably see where this is going…

Yesterday, on a whim, I thought about checking crash reports on Flurry. And that confirmed my fears – my game has been crashing, and ProGuard had optimized out ACRA, so I wasn’t getting any crash reports from my release build. Awesome. I was working on an update anyway, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll just disable ProGuard, I’m not sure it’s really buying me that much anyway. Big mistake. Big big mistake.

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