Osmos can't detect multitouch on 9.7 tablet with 4.1.1JB

[hemibp]

Osmos quits on start up with the message titled "Multitouch not detected" and an additional message saying that my device does not support multitouch functionality.

The device is a Chinese Window N90II 9.7' tablet running Jellybean 4.1.1 and has 5 point multitouch.
Basically one of these: [url http://www.aliexpress.com/item/9-7-OEM- ... 99471.html]

Despite my device's possibly dubious origins, it's a fully functional android device and has superior hardware to most of the ones on the market.
Using the app "YAMTT", I can confirm that it really does have the multitouch it claims to. So how I convince Osmos of this?

This occurs with:
Osmos 1.2.5
and
Osmos 1.2.16hb (both mobile and tablet versions)

All were downloaded from the Humble Bundle for Android site though one was from a year or so ago and the other two were from a few days ago.

[apportable]

Hi hemibp,

Wow ... have to admit, we haven't heard that one before, and we've heard about a lot of interesting error messages. Our guess is that this tablet is not reporting its multitouch capabilities correctly somehow, since Osmos's programming in this regard is very standard for Android applications. Are you running a custom ROM on this device? Also, does this device have Google Play natively, or did you need to install Google Play separately? We do not support custom ROMs or devices that do not support Google Play natively (with the exception of the Kindle Fire).

Thanks for helping us look into this!

- The Apportable Team

[hemibp]

Gosh, a response! I had almost given up hope of playing Osmos on my tablet. Thanks for checking the forum.

The YAMTT is just a standard free multi-touch testing app from the store and it sees it ok but whatever. To answer your questions:
* I'm not running a custom-ROM, it's the stock one it came with
* It has Google Play native

I installed Osmos as apks obviously, since they were downloaded from the HumbleBundle. If I can get HB apps through the play store then I guess I can do that but I didn't think I could.

Any other questions?

[apportable]

Thanks for the additional information. We're pretty sure that the tablet isn't reporting its multitouch capabilities correctly, which is why the error is popping up for you. Unfortunately, one of the downsides that we've seen of having a less common Android tablet is that unusual issues like this will pop up on the device/firmware side. While we'd like to be able to help, we have limited development and testing resources for fixing issues that are this rare. As far as we know, there isn't a way to manually cause your tablet to change its capability reporting. We'll keep an eye out for any further reports of this issue and look into it further if it seems like it's affecting a significant number of potential users. In the meantime, we hope you can play Osmos on a different Android device.

Thank you for your understanding!

~The Apportable Team

[hemibp]

My first instinct was to be sceptical about it being the device's fault so I decided to do some digging to see for myself.

After a few hours learning how to debug Android apks and discovering the uses of logcat, I find that the error string comes from some support library called libverde rather than core Osmos code. There's almost no information about libverde around the net, can you tell me what it is?

I can see that it's being loaded in initialisation, but it's not clear to me why/how it checks for multitouch or where it's told to do so. Apparently I'm not the first person to have problems with this though most of the others seem to be pirating their apks so aren't going to official tech support. I suppose I'll end up patching the libverde binary to override the multitouch check though it would be easier if I knew where the library came from and was for.

It would be nice if configuration settings allowed the user to override app hardware requirements for exactly this sort of thing but with the check occurring during initialisation covered by the splash screen, there isn't much chance to pop up a settings window. Maybe initialisation failure could divert to a config dialog in future apps?

You mention my playing Osmos on a different Android device and actually it runs with only slight lag on my HTC Desire which is unsupported due to being single core and well below official specs. That's a case for permitting users to override hardware requirements; if dual-core were enforced, my device which runs it would not be permitted to. Where multitouch is enforced, a device which probably can run it very well, isn't allowed to. So I can only play it on a 2' screen instead of a 10' one, which gets old quickly.

tl;dr: what's libverde?