Sorry for the cross-forum post, just hoping the Unity Android guys get a look at it, i travelled the lands of google and found this thread (And final post) on the ARM forums
http://forums.arm.com/index.php?/topic/15064-dithering-on-sgs2mali400mp/
Could it be useful? And if it is and i cant do it myself could I expect a fix before the 15th or so? Cheers!
no on the second (thats a week, a fix in that time is something you can hope for if you use premium services to get it done especially), the next unity release is likely 3.5 which I would date as per Unite 2011 at earliest. (if larger parts of the roadmap are moved to 3.6), as we havent seen any x.x.1 bugfix releases in U3 anymore
I suppose it’s their loss if they want their games to look pretty naff on one of the most popular handsets in the world
You say that as if its by intend of UT that the SGS2 sucks when it is meant to handle 16bit correctly as any other mobile since early iOS / Android days ware able to. I’m on an SGS2 myself too, so nothing about theory here, more the dislike of how from Samsung ARM handle the situation when it comes to proper handling the standard color depth on mobile, 16bit
I’m sure they are looking into it on how to handle it (though I would expect it to enforce 32bit)
It’s fine with 16bit, it’s more you have to specify a 24bit colour depth in your app’s code or it’ll display everything in 16bit, with all its glorious banding and that fun stuff (Which i’m having problems with, it looks terrible)
In the link i posted it shows how to do this(I think?), it’s obviously Samsung and ARM’s shortfall, they really shouldn’t put the onus on the developer to do something thats de rigeur for every other recent device, it’s just that until it’s fixed, a handset that should be exciting is being kind of a disappointment, an expensive one
There is a reason why all texture formats aside of advanced does not show 24bits. There is no hardware anymore thats able to render in 24bits (the last was matrox perphelia in 2006 or so on the desktop), they are either in 16bit (older mobile) or 32bit bit + fake support for other formats (like 24bit), cause the hw can not 24bit align values, only 32bit or 16bit and anything unaligned means hw level / driver level offseting etc to get it to run performantly
The only delta that iOS vs Android has here at the time is that on iOS you have a checkbox in the player settings to tell it to use a 32bit backbuffer, which android doesn’t offer. Offering that should solve the whole topic as would a “SGS2? > 32bit backbuffer”.
Question is why they didnt add the checkbox on android, cause they surely had a reason not to offer it (like device + driver fuckup-mentation which forces many engine level detections to work fine on more than 3 android devices).
I suppose i should say 32bit rather than 24bit really, but I guess that doesnt overcome what’s at hand
I’m sure it’ll be sorted out at some point, but it is quite annoying, at least now i’m using a Desire as the target to get everything working now it makes sure i’m keeping the performance of the game up
I say the 15th because thats more or less where i’ll be leaving making it work on the Desire behind, or more, have everything running great on the Desire then seeing how pretty I can make it on a more powerful device… obviously something mitigated by this problem
Its interesting how many persons were that annoyed by the HTC desire, the missing 2.3 update, the “out of disk space to install” or whatever and went to the SGS2, as I’m one of those too 
And I understand that its not optimal to target it, that being said you naturally still can work on “non color dependent higher end stuff” like usage of normalmaps, denser environments and alike, more complex shaders with shader lod fallback and alike, technical things in general that have no “color dependence” unlike the art and finetuning at the end, towards high end but also Samsungs Super Amoled
Ahh well the Desire I got for my partner, I had a go at making games on it earlier in the year then on a whim decided to make a decent go, hence the S2
I’m very much looking forwards to using more shader-based effects, normal maps, reflections and so on, and if course that’s perfectly workable, along with a lot more alpha-based effects that i’m really looking forwards to, for me thats the fun part of the process
It’s certainly not like I can’t do a great deal without the colour focus but… yes, it’s a big deal for me for the finished game, especially as a lot of the people testing and trying it out are using the s2 also
A smart fellow who cooked up an alternative shadow approach in the showcase forum found this explanation on how to change to rgb888 on android, i assume this might alleviate the banding issues on the s2 but it doesnt seem to be working or i’m doing somethng wrong
Building the renamed UnityPlayerActivity.java with javac produces one class, which i used the jar command to put into a classes.jar and put in Assets/Plugins/Android along with the altered AndroidManifest.xml, to no avail sadly. Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Well, after a bit of chat this clever man came up with this guide http://gustavolsson.squarespace.com/development-blog/2011/9/4/enabling-a-32bit-backbuffer-on-android-devices-using-unity-3.html that will enable the 32bit backbuffer for the s2
Allows his shadow technique to work (Which is great, works on unity free/mobiles, its in the asset store) and for those with the galaxy s2, it fixes the banding excellently, finally!
LazyGunn, thanks for the solution!!!
I was about to throw the galaxy s2 out of the window.
Did this issue got resolved with 3.5 beta? (I reverted back to 3.4.2).