GUI: Strange flickering and artifacts on android (DEF-2071)

Bugs
1

I observed a very strange behaviour in my project. When running on Android, my text nodes soon start to flicker very heavily. Sometimes even the whole screen flickers to black or strange artifacts like vertically stretched bars appear.
On windows everything looks fine.

This happened after i added a few more nodes to a gui-object (which now has 18 nodes). So when i delete some of those new nodes, the flickering disappears.

The problem is that i can’t identify what’s wrong with my new nodes. They are simple textured box nodes. The problem persists even if i delete all my new nodes and replace them with blank, untouched ones. So it seems to have something to do with the number of nodes in my scene, because if i delete some of my identical blank test-nodes, the flickering disappears again like with my original, textured ones.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue and/or can point me to possible solutions?

2

Hello @Daggett! This sounds a lot like an issue that was reported internally last week. We haven’t had time to look into it yet but if I remember correctly it has been planned for 1.2.88 (the next version). Could you please provide some additional information about what device you’re testing on and what Android version you’re running?

2 Likes
3

Sure, im glad to help.

I’m testing on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 running with Android 6.0.1. The device is not modified or rooted or anything like that.

4

After some more fruitless hunting for the cause of the problem i now split my gui into two files. This seems to work so far, so it should be a suitable workaround if anyone struggles with a similar problem until it is fixed in the engine.

2 Likes
5

BTW: I had this issue in my gui-scene before the flickering started:
https://forum.defold.com/t/glitch-when-copy-pasting-text-node-from-one-gui-file-to-another/2762

Maybe there is a connection between this two bugs, because i have other gui-scenes with many more objects which do not cause any flickering. The only scene causing the flickering is currently the one where i had problems with pasting text nodes.