[Galaxy S II General] TML1504:
hi,

just a short info for everyone who wants to use x-plane (the best flight-sim atm) as well as some other high-end games on the sgs2:

since i have my sgs2 i wasn't able to run the game "x-plane", it always gave me the error message "Error detecting texture compression formats"

yesterday i wrote an email to folks @laminar research! today they contacted me and asked me if i could provide a logcat protocol of the x-plane crash. few minutes later i received a reply from Chris, stating that the reason is indeed the Mali-400 MP used by our SGS2!

"the Mali-400 GPU doesn't support any texture compression formats that XPlane requires (PVR, ATITC, DXT). It only supports ETC which we cannot use for various reasons."

perhaps this info is usefull not only for x-plane users, because

"A lot of premium content games are going to hit this issue as well. I'm a bit astounded at this discovery but their own documentation confirms it."

also laminar was very friendly and offered me a refund!

i hope this can be fixed in the future...

regards,

markus

update 21.05.2011:

i think all people concerned have read and understood the actual situation,

to make it short for new readers here a small update of the current situation:

the problem is not mali, but developers not using standard ETC texture compression

(which is the ONLY specified OpenGL ES texture compression format), for various

reasons (for example such as simple product politics).

what does this mean for us:

because of the big impact the SGS2 will probably have, developers will sooner

or later support ETC. some games (from gameloft) have already beed updated.

this is a step into the right direction, especially because as said by some members

this could at least be some counterpart to android fragmentation.

nevertheless, as long as some developers insist to use (only) DXTn, ATITC or PVRTC

this games (or programms) wont work on SG2, BUT:

the fabulous genius CHAINFIRE has programmed an application called Chainfire3D,

which "is an intermediary OpenGL driver. What does that mean? It means that

Chainfire3D sits between your apps and the graphics drivers, and can intercept

and/or change commands between the two. It has some built-in functions, and

can be further extended with plugins to provide extra functionality."

see here for details: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1087427

what we would need now is a developer who sacrifices a few hours to build us some

plugins (warning: maybe there are legal issues, so this has to be clarified as well),

which should be, according to chainfire, no real problem for a skilled programmer:

"To make some of these plugins work you will need to add a bit of code. Though

well documented in various places on the internet, in various countries this trivial

code is protected by patent law, which is why it is not included in the source or

binary packages."

all information which is needed is in the before mentioned thread from chainfire,

just look into his API document...

soooo, can someone please be so nice to have a look at the creation of the needed

plugins?? this would be the last step necessary for getting all the games or

programs we want to work! :))

update 23.05.2011:

regarding the plugins:

just google for "chainfire" and open your eyes!!!

:D:D:D