Hey Folks, I've just released another beta which adds the Cleric's Paladin subclass!
With this things have lurched quite a distance toward release. I'm hoping to get the Cleric content-complete in about another two weeks.
Here's a little GIF of one of their spells: Wall of Light
(Image Description: A short GIF of the Cleric casting the wall of light spell toward three enemies. The enemies are knocked away and momentarily stunned, and a large diagonal white wall appears between them and the Cleric.)
FYI, still working on my Android 4 Zeki tablet ๐
Glad to see it! I wish I didn't have to drop support for 4.4 and below, because there's nothing stopping the core game from still using it.
I'll keep updating until it fails and then I'll just have to play newer versions on newer devices.
It really a shame that programmers are forced to make unnecessary changes.
Yeah... Google forcing everyone to update is bad I agree, but libraries dropping support for Android 4.4- does make some sense. It's got to do with native code and toolchains and the old dalvik runtime (Android 5.0+ uses ART). I'm no native code expert but apparently the native toolchain team has to make significant afforances for code running on dalvik, and they've been eager to drop it for a while now so that they can simplify a bunch of code. That change happened a year or so ago and has percolated to everything else that uses native code, which for me is libGDX and Google Play's various libraries.
Whenever I compile a PD, I do all my work in a Virtual Machine and keep all data used.
VMware recently made VM software free for personal use.
I don't compile apps with intent to release them through Playstore.
It would be extra work to maintain a 4x build, but it could be done if the libraries were stored in an offline VM.
Perhaps someone else would be willing to work with you on maintaining the project.
I just hate to think that Google can force millions of users to have to buy new devices just to keep updating the game.
Someone else is welcome to do that with the source if they want to of course, but given that I'll be updating libGDX as well it wouldn't just be about Google's libraries.
I don't think I'd be interested in distributing such a variant officially though (if I was I'd make it myself). Android 4.4- users make up about 1% of active Android devices for shattered specifically and 0.2% of devices globally. Hopefully that numbers will continue to fall a bit by the end of the year, as I'm not cutting support just yet.