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Exoplanet Explorer: A rough couple of days

Space Exploration

It took me two days to figure out why the newly released Exoplanet Explorer would occasionally start without showing a user interface.

What made it really difficult was that the app worked perfectly on my collection of Android devices. I couldn’t reproduce the issue.

Thanks to everyone who contacted me by email. Because of your help I eventually detected the common factor: all of the affected devices had an nVidia graphics chip, Tegra 2, 3 or 4.

I hadn’t been able to test on nVidia because I no longer have any nVidia devices… except of course for my Ouya console which I’d forgotten about, hidden away under the TV.

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Installing the app on the Ouya showed the expected result: no UI or User Interface.

It was actually a very simple issue. nVidia devices were not drawing the UI. The app wasn’t crashing, it just waiting for the startup window to close. The menu was invisible, and the button to close it couldn’t be seen, so the app looked like it had frozen.

Solving it was another matter. I spent many hours gradually dismantling the app piece-by-piece until the UI re-appeared on the Ouya.

It turned out that it was just a glitch with the camera. The labels under the stars were far away from the camera, and the menu UI was close to the camera so that it was in front of everything. The nVidia bug meant that the far away labels were causing the menus that were close to the camera to be invisible. Removing those far away labels caused the menus to magically reappear.

Exoplanet Explorer

A screen shot from the new version of Exoplanet Explorer Lite

I had to modify the way background labels were handled and bring them closer to the camera to solve the problem.

The updated version of Exoplanet Explorer HD is 2.5.4 and went out to Google Play late yesterday. All affected Tegra devices should be working now.

With this problem solved, I finally pushed the updated Exoplanet Explorer Lite to Google Play as well. It’s now called Exoplanet Explorer.

There are still some outstanding things that need fixing in the new Exoplanet Explorer apps, but they are mostly minor/cosmetic changes which will gradually appear over the next few updates.

  • Hernen

    Hi Neil. There seems to be another Bug in ExEx. Wenn zooming intolerant a system you can see a white shadow which lays over some stars and might be caused from the labels of the stars in the galaxy view. There are also not all close stars labled in galaxy view, so you can just chose some of them via finger tipping. Sometimes zooming into a system isn’t possible and you habe to quit ExEx and Start again. Three suggestions for a further update: 1) is IT possible to give the stars in the system view the Same bright light as the sun in SolarEx wich the lense flare and all that. Of course the brightness should depend on how bright the star realen is. 2) Could you create an Option, that the screen stars on white using ExEx without constantly touching IT to keep it wolkig? 3) Is it possible to Show the estimated temperature of a Planet when you’ve zoomed in on plant view depending how far it actually is from its star.

    • Yeah, the white shadow is all the hidden labels showing through as ghosts. I only noticed it after posting the update 2.5.4 update. It’s a side effect of the changes I made to get the labels working on Tegra. I can fix it though, but I don’t want to upload another 80MB update for a few days – I’ve had people get upset when I’ve done 3 much smaller updates in quick succession on Solar Explorer…

      Not all the stars are labelled in near space because there’s too many to label. I’ve built in a binary 3D sort that should pick the 50 nearest stars, but it seems to be skipping some. I didn’t have time to figure out why, but it’s on the list.

      The lock up you are seeing – was that on version 2.5.4? 2.5.3 would lock up whenever a system with a hot sub-terran system was clicked on. If you are on 2.5.4, can you reproduce the issue, and if so what are you clicking on prior to the lock up?

      1) Bright light/lens flares are on the to-do list as well. The code is already in the app, but I didn’t want to activate it until I’ve had time to investigate how it will affect performance.
      2) You mean you want the screen to stay on while the app is active. There was an Android permission used in the old app for that, if I recall correctly. I’m pretty sure there’s an option for that in Unity. I’ll see what I can do.
      3) The temperature should be in the info panel. If it’s showing a question mark, then there’s no value in the imported data. I could probably add an option for a brief summary under the planet’s name tag though… I’ll put it on the list of things for the future.

  • Hernen

    Sorry! Auto-correction made point two a bit of a mess. I mean, in you can make it possible, that you have the option, that the screen stays on while using ExEx.
    Thanks

  • Hernen

    I guess the lock up is not determined to a special system. When I was klicking through the list of the system the First lock occured on gj832 and the on all the others after that. When it happens you even have a blank Box, when you click on the Info button. Its on Version 2.5.4
    Without the temperature: I mean, if there’s a was to show the change of the temperature when the Planet is revolving round its sun. (the difference beteten Apherion an Perhelion).