Legacy vs iPhone5 touch areas

Adrenaline

Hi all,

I've been developing a game and testing it on my legacy iPod Touch. The game utilizes buttons on the edge of the screen, and it's been working perfectly.
I was finally able to test it on an iPhone5, and I've run into a huge problem.

In my game, I placed invisible actors on top of visible graphics. The invisible actors serve as larger touch areas for the visible graphics. I hope that makes sense. (It's not required that you understand why I did this, but I anticipated questions...so here's the answer lol)

The touch areas for the buttons on the iPhone5 are all shifted towards the center of the screen. The graphics appear in the correct place, but the invisible actors that I use to control the touching of buttons are out of place.

I published my game using Letterbox not Overscan, so I was hoping this problem wouldn't happen.

Any idea why I'm running into this? And even better, how to resolve it?

tenrdrmer

not sure why your having the issue but in the creator preview you can test how your layout looks but changing the device you want to view it on in the little drop down menu at the top right. Also you will have to start using overscan someone posted an article the other day that said Apple is no longer going to be accepting letter boxed games. all new and updated apps must support iPhone 5 resolution

Adrenaline

That's terrible news for me. My game depends on the edges of the screen. I can't afford to have it bleed off the sides on Legacy formats.

Back when I was first starting this project, I tried to have the placement, width and height of the important actors all respond to the size of the screen/device.

It only worked if I changed the selected device in the Project Manager of GameSalad. If I simply switched devices in the drop-down menu of the viewer, it didn't respond. I also tried testing that version of my app on my iPad (with Legacy iPhone as the selected device in Project Manager). It didn't work...it was a scaled down Legacy size.

Does anyone know of a way to do what I tried to do before?

If it's not possible in GameSalad, dynamic scaling and placement would be possible if I hired a developer to code my game in a traditional way...right?

Adrenaline

I find it hard to believe that I can't dynamically place and scale actors, depending on the size of the device. Like I mentioned above, I tried to do this in earlier builds but found no success. I got it to respond to the device I chose in the Project Settings, but not to the different devices I chose in the drop down of the Preview Mode. It also doesn't respond to being on different devices when I ad hoc test. It acts as if it's always on the device that was selected in Project Settings.

Can anyone show me where I'm going wrong?

tenrdrmer

You can. You have to use the device screen size and set the actor positions based in that another option is the various camera adjusting tricks out there that you based the cam size on the screen size. Personally I base all my stuff on the device aspect ratios. Since android has so many device sizes but most most fall into a handful of aspect ratios.

Adrenaline

It's great that you say I can, that gives me hope. But I'm a little confused, because I have definitely tried that already.
I'm not in front of my working computer at the moment so I may be getting terms a little mixed up here, but I know there are two different screen size options to choose in the expressions...something like "screen size", and another "device size"? Something like that.
The point is...I don't understand the difference between these two terms. Why do they both exist, and which should I use for my purpose?

Thanks again for helping out, this is a huge obstacle I need to overcome and the feedback is greatly appreciated!

tenrdrmer

Device.screen.witdh and
Device.screen.height are what you are looking for I Believe. It definitely works just takes some getting used to cause it can be kinda screwy also it doesn't work right if you base on screen size and then choose 50 % view in the creator. So you have to use the aspect ratio route or only view on 100%

Adrenaline

Okay, I'll give it another shot. Thanks for the help, it's definitely appreciated

Adrenaline

This might be a silly question but...can't I just use this technique to apply the same App to an iPad, and it should fill the screen accordingly? Because it's not working. Does it need to be a separately published file with iPad selected as the device in the GameSalad Publishing options?

-Edit-

Looks like it was a silly question. I just used the universal binaries publishing option and it seems to be responding. Oh man, I've got a lot of work to do!