Textures on Android are broken for ~15 months already

[TheStalwart]

Both ETC1 and ETC2 texture compression formats are broken on Android since at least AIR 16.0, up to latest AIR 22.0.

Let's start with ETC1.

Bug#4089178 - Graphic Glitches on Android 6

Bug#4041690 - ATF texture is corruption on MALI GPU platform

Bug#3961778 - ATF artifacts (not usual compression related artifacts) on some android devices

Re: [Stage3D]The ATF compress texture quality loss in some phone.

help！Texture has something wrong · Issue #755 · Gamua/Starling-Framework · GitHub

Discovered back in March 2015, at first, bug affected only a few niche devices like Galaxy Note 4, but since then, affected GPUs had been adopted by mainstream bestsellers.

Bug is reproducible on following devices (among others):

• Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge
• LG Nexus 5X
• Huawei G7 Plus
• OPPO R7s
• HTC One E9PLUS

This bug was claimed to be fixed on multiple occasions in release notes of AIR 19.0-22.0, but i've never seen a single AIR release that reproduced this issue in a different way, let alone fixed.

When ETC2 was introduced in AIR 18.0, we expected it to be a viable workaround for ETC1 issue, since most (all?) of affected devices are capable of OpenGL 3.0.

Guess what? It never worked, and still doesn't. Bug#4033509 - ETC2 not display on Nexus 7

Even more so, even if ETC2 would work, we can't reliably publish multiple APKs to deploy it due to a packager bug - Bug#4123604 - <supports-gl-texture> tag in Android manifestAdditions prevents project from building

We were using RGBA8888 textures as a workaround, carefully managing memory, because even if you have multiple gigabytes of RAM on modern Androids, you can't actually use more than ~1.5Gb due to some weird AIR runtime limitation. Even if we could use all the RAM, it's not a real solution, since some manufacturers (hi, LG!) considered early 2016 to be a good timeframe to release phones with <2Gb RAM.

And then this charlie foxtrot got REAL. In one of the AIR 22.0 betas, RGBA8888 was broken. Bug#4149945 - AIR 22.121 display bug with ATF . NONE of the texture formats worked on Android for this release. Bro, do you even QA?

While the last issue had been fixed in final AIR 22.0 release, it's still a very complicated and unreliable workaround for 2D games relying on spritesheet animation.

Please fix the ETC1 and ETC2 formats, it's not funny anymore.

Pavel Shevchuk

Skywind Tech LV

[Kratika Agarwal]

Hi,

We are working on fixing these issues.

We will keep you updated.

Thanks

[Castenmiller]

Now a month since the last response. I share the same frustrations. We've seen this bug on some devices, it then seems fixed for some of those devices (like Galaxy S6) but is now causing problems on other devices (eg. Sony Xperia z5 compact). This issue alone is making us consider switching away from Adobe AIR.

[Guest]

Is this issue with huawei-g7-plus?

Buy Huawei G7 Plus 228$. Prices for G7 Plus cheap with free delivery.

[TheStalwart · Accepted solution]

Issue seems to be fixed in AIR SDK 23.0.0.215.

Tested on following devices:

LG Nexus 5X

Huawei G7 Plus

OPPO R7s

Samsung Galaxy S6

Samsung Galaxy Edge+

HTC One E9PLUS

[User_Unknow]

also was fixed

ATF Textures (with JPEG Compression) are not rendered properly on MALI GPU.(3961778)

from 10 aug 2016