Playing on a phone

Saltwarden is meant to run in the browser, phones included. This week we tried it in earnest, on an ordinary Android phone over mobile data. The result was not pretty at first: the world stayed grey, only the minimap and the buttons showed up. Then you got thrown back to the realm list without a word. And whoever made it into the game could not open the menu or talk to anyone.

We found three causes, and all three were homework, not sorcery.

The grey world: our outdoor tileset was 4,256 pixels tall. Many phone graphics chips accept images only up to 4,096 pixels per edge. The upload fails silently and the whole outdoor world stays empty, while minimap and interface keep working because they do not go through the GPU. The image is now split in two on export, and a build check refuses any texture above 4,096 pixels.

The kick: the server dropped any connection that stayed silent for five seconds. On a cable you never notice; on mobile data a dead spot is enough. It is twenty seconds now, and your character stays protected meanwhile. A second mechanism used to cut the connection the moment the send buffer filled up; it now waits and catches up. If the connection still breaks, the client tries to re-enter on its own before showing the realm list.

Memory: a character with gear quickly takes over a hundred megabytes on the GPU, because pixel art is large once decoded. On a phone that means stutter and, eventually, a reloaded tab. There is now a budget per device class, images load in smaller parts and only when needed, and the caches count bytes instead of items. Measurements on real devices are still running.

And the controls: the menu now has tappable tabs and scrolls inside its frame, the chat folds into a bubble, and a tap on a character selects it while a second tap talks, attacks or opens the vendor. A context button shows what is possible right now.

It is not done. We now know which combinations of device, browser and network to test, and for the first time we have diagnostics that tell us from the phone what went wrong. If you play the alpha on a phone, the most helpful thing you can give us is exactly those three details: device, browser, network.

Saltwarden Online is inspired by classic MMORPGs and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any other game or its publisher.