A bunch of improvements of particular interest to mobile (Android, iOS) developers. In completely related news, stay tuned for The Unholy Society on Android and iOS release 🙂

Improvements:

1. Updated our Docker image (affects also FPC/Lazarus used to build the default CGE releases) to:

   • for FPC 3.0.2, upgrade Lazarus version to 2.0.0
   • for FPC 3.0.4, upgrade Lazarus version to 2.0.12
   • for FPC 3.2.0, upgrade Lazarus version to 2.0.12
   • for FPC trunk, upgraded SVN revisions to latest 48998 (FPC) and 64830 (Lazarus). Also documented FPC trunk support.
   • use latest Android NDK layout for libraries (to adjust to changes described here (they removed ndk-bundle/platforms/ subdirectory) and here.

   Why? We want to use latest fixes from everything 🙂 We also want GTK2 fixes from latest Lazarus 2.0.12. We also want latest FPC trunk with fix for optimizations on 64-bit ARM (Aarch64), important for mobile platforms.

2. Updated Android and fpcupdeluxe wiki docs to reflect new locations of Android libs in Android NDK.

3. Our Android build process was updated to use latest Android Gradle Plugin (4.1.0). Note that this also requires newer Gradle (6.5+), it will be downloaded automatically in normal setups. This fixes building with latest NDK.

4. We now have examples/mobile/achievements/ demo. This is almost identical to the “New Project -> 2D Game” template but also reports achievements to Google Play Games or Apple Game Center.

   Old example examples/2d_dragon_spine_game/ was removed. The template “New Project -> 2D Game” now serves better to show it.

5. Aarch64 optimizations are now enabled when FPC is >= 3.3.1 .

   Note: we just assume that if we have FPC version >= 3.3.1 then it is at least revision 48104. Documented here, see Trello ticket.

6. FMOD service on Android works! This allows to use FMOD sound library on Android easily. By Eugene Loza and Michalis. See FMOD service on Android docs and FMOD docs.