AM2R on Two Screens: The Developer Bringing Metroid's Fan Remake to Android Handhelds

Of all the things you might expect to cause performance problems during a frantic reactor escape in AM2R, a temperature gauge probably wouldn't be high on the list. There are collapsing walls, explosions, and all manner of things happening on screen, any one of which seems a reasonable suspect when the frame rate begins to struggle. Yet when the developer known as PatchDev began investigating why this particular sequence wasn't performing as well as it should on lower-powered Android handhelds specifically, he discovered something rather unexpected. The temperature display was repeatedly updating itself even when nothing had changed, doing considerably more work than was necessary to show the player the same information.Fixing that behavior helped the sequence run more smoothly, without removing the explosions or compromising the experience. This is just a relatively small example of the work PatchDev has been doing on his AM2R Android Autopatcher project, but I think it illustrates…