It's been a very busy couple of days for me! The alpha release of War Worlds has gone a lot better than I could have hoped, with so many downloading and playing the game, I'm really over the moon!

However, there have also been quite a few bug reports, and that makes me very sad :( I'm working my way through the crash reports and bug reports that people have been sending me (thank you so much to every one who has reported a bug!) and I have a new update posted to the Play Store today.

Android 2.2

Users on Android 2.2 were getting a crash on the very first screen because I was using the method SharedPreferences.Editor.apply() which was only added to Android 2.3. Unfortunatly, the "old" Android that I've been using (an old Nexus One) was running 2.3 so I never noticed this problem.

OutOfMemory errors

It seems the fixes I made yesterday fixed the majority of OutOfMemory errors I was seeing, but there were still a few more reported even on that version. I've made some further changes that should reduce those even more but if you have an older device or you believe you're still affected, one way to improve the situation is to set the "Starfield Detail" setting to "Solid black (fastest)" this will not only make rendering the starfield faster, it will also reduce the memory footprint quite a bit. Of course, it doesn't look quite as good, unfortunately.

I might add a check in the code for devices with relative small heap sizes and automatically set that setting, but I'll see how the crash reports go after today's update.

Pressing "back" from a popup while updates were in progress

This one is a little unfortunate, but after you queue up a build, the game fires off an AsyncTask to actually update the server with your request. If you press "back" to dismiss the dialog and then "back" again to dismiss the activty, then when the AsyncTask completes, it will crash because the dialog it was expecting to dismiss no longer exists.

The "fix" is to disable the "back" button while that async task is still running. I say it's "unfortunate" because I'd rather a more elegant solution that let you cancel the dialog if you want to but also not to crash, but for now "not crashing" is the most important. I'll revisit this feature when I've got a bit more time to investigate it properly.

Misc

I've also fixed a number of additional NullPointerExceptions and a few other bug reports from users (for example, if you had the "Starfield detail" setting to "Solid Black" you would get a "hall of mirrors" effect as you scroll around the map). Thanks to every one who reported a crash and bug, you're helping to make the game better with every update!