Lab Rats 2 v0.30.0 Android Release!

Good news everyone! The android build for LR2 v0.30.0 is available now! If you're already a patron you can find the download link on the original release post, here. Unfortunately, the android version is missing 3 of the new face styles and one of the old ones, for reasons I'll explain below. On the up side, I realized I forgot to add the old face styles back in after removing them from the random pool for testing on the desktop versions, so you get to have those instead.

I put up a post yesterday about my troubleshooting efforts, and ended with a best-guess of what the problem might be. Today I can confirm that the problem was, as best as I can tell, an arbitrary/undocumented limit to the number of files that can be handled by the Ren'py android build process. The limit seems to be 65,536, which would be the highest number 2 bytes can store (2^16 = 65,536). There are two possibilities that I can think of for why this limit might exist. First, as I hypothesized yesterday, the process may index all of the files. When it reaches 65,536 it wraps around to 0, which already has an entry and causes an error.

The second possibility is one I've discovered after finding this specific limit and being able to do some more detailed searching. It seems that android apps have a limit 65,536 methods that can be defined. The Ren'py build process may create a unique method for accessing each potential image file, so when the project image count reaches 65,536 it fails out.

In both cases I'll be able to fix this for future releases, but the fix will depend on what the problem really is. The simplest fix is likely to be to pack all of the images into a file archive like a .zip before building the android version, and have it unpack that .zip on the first run of the game. Unfortunately this would likely be a multi-minute operation, which I'd like to avoid. Creating image atlases, as I suggested yesterday, would result in Ren'py having to load large images into memory, undoing the progress I made with the new clipping methods this update. Ideally the root of the problem is there being an android method limit, which I might be able to increase by turning on "Multidex" mode (Building multiple directories that point to where methods may be found). Unfortunately this ability may be hidden away by Ren'py itself and not available to me without a bit of extra work.

Regardless, I'm glad to have the Android version out and available to test! The date of the public release remains unchanged, so I've got to get back to work!