Rendering error of iphone-only apps on iPad?

svantana

I just got rejected on the app store because my iphone-only app looked cropped when run on an ipad. Digging into this problem, it seems to be rooted pretty deeply into the sparrow renderer. Since I have a hard time understanding how the renderer works I haven't been able to find the bug unfortunately. Perhaps Daniel or someone else who's very familiar with sparrow can take a look?

Here's how to recreate the bug (for example):

Take the barebones project, go to target -> General -> devices, set to "iPhone"
Put the following code in Game.m:

for (int i=0; i<100; i++) {
    SPQuad *q = [SPQuad quadWithWidth:1000 height:1000 color: 0xff+i*12345];
    q.x = i*10;
    q.y = i*10;
    [self addChild:q];
}

Run the app on an iPad or the ipad simulator. For me, the outer rectangles are cropped. The visible screen size is either 640x920 (portrait) or 960x600 (landscape).

Note: this is on xCode5, iOS7 ipad & simulator. Not sure if this happens on other configurations.

svantana

could this have something to do with the status bar? The cropped area has the same position and size as the status bar, which is now transparent on iOS7...

niksan

Do you have an image for us to see? I don't have access to try this myself, I do know however that when running my map renderer on my iPod versus iPad I had to have an extra tiles rendering at the edge, seemed a different aspect or the dimensions just didn't scale too well, never dug deeper into it.

I'm guessing this is a problem when doing the x2 zoom?

svantana

Well the x2 thing (doubleOnPad or whatever) is kind of moot, since this is when doing iPhone-only apps, as far as I know there is no way of telling from the runtime if it's running on an iPhone or iPad.

The thing here is, sparrow simply won't draw outside of this cropped area. You can make a quad 5000 x 5000 pixels and place it wherever, still cropped screen.

niksan

In that case there will be a glScissor call somewhere in the code base (I don't have access to code here either) IIRC there is some check for the platform, as it's what's used to determine what textures to load, @2x et al.

niksan

Ignore all that, it seems to have changed somewhat since I last looked. If you don't get a real answer in the meantime, I have an iPad at hand at home and will give it a try to see what's happening when I get there, it's a lot easier when you can debug and see actual code. 🙂

By the way, what version of sparrow are you using?

svantana

I'm using the latest git tip. And you don't need an actual iPad to check it out, it does the same on the simulator. But it may be an ios7 thing though.

Daniel

You were right, it did have something to do with the Status Bar! Add the following setting to your App-Info.plist:

View controller-based status bar appearance: NO

That fixed it for me, at least in the simulator of an iPad with iOS 7 (older iOS versions work fine without that).

That said: it would be rather easy to make your game a universal application (which has better visibility in the App Store). The Sparrow Demo shows the fastest way to do that -- just have a look at the last couple of lines of "DemoAppDelegate.m".

svantana

Aha, thanks, that worked. Although in the meantime I took your advice and made it a universal app... 😎

Daniel

Perfect! 🙂