Oct 8th update: The 2.3.5 update for SGS2 seems to fix the problem. At least I can’t reproduce the problem anymore. I don’t know how quickly the update will roll out for all the different versions of the phone and in different regions, but if the problem indeed has been fixed,  it might not be worth the trouble to work around it. Unless of course you get other benefits from OpenSL.

I received feedback in June about DiceShaker D&D crashing on the then new Samsung Galaxy S2. After finally getting a proper excuse to buy one, I was quickly able to reproduce the problem. Looking at the stack trace produced by the crash, it seemed to be caused by SoundPool.

I/DEBUG   (20675): *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
I/DEBUG   (20675): signal 11 (SIGSEGV), code 1 (SEGV_MAPERR), fault addr deadbaad
I/DEBUG   (20675):          #12  pc 000046ae  /system/lib/libsoundpool.so

SoundPool is one of the available options for playing sounds in an Android application, perhaps the best / easiest to use for game sound effects. Googling “galaxy s2 soundpool” I found out that other app developers had also had the same problem reported, and made the same conclusion about the cause. The problem had been reported to the Andoid bug tracker on June 13th.  Reducing the number of audio channels used seemed to gradually make the SoundPool crashes less frequent, but I couldn’t get completely rid of the problem until reducing the channels to one. That didn’t sound like a good solution, so I temporarily excluded the SGS2 from the supported devices list, and hoped that Samsung/Google would fix the problem shortly – it was constantly crashing even high profile titles like Cut the Rope (on Gift Box levels), so it might get some priority.

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DiceShaker D&D version 1.2.0 is out. The 3D RPG dice roller for Android now has multicolored dice, switchable dice screens, touch reactive dice and more. Check out the release notes on the forums.

DiceShaker D&D on Android Market

I was finally able to get my hands on a Motorola Xoom for testing my RPG rice roller, DiceShaker D&D. There were few problems related to the default landscape orientation of the device and the Tegra 2 GPU, but I think I got those fixed. The vibration effects should also work a bit better on the Galaxy S with this version. Check out the v1.1.2 release notes on the forum.

Pallosalama is the home of CallerInfo, a caller-id application for phones running the Android operating system.