For better or worse, advertisements have shown to be a very successful revenue plan. Some of the most popular and top grossing apps today rely prominently or exclusively on ad revenue. I have been requesting some improvements to AGK's advertisement commands for a few years now, unsuccessfully. Specifically, I would love to see by next release:
Banner Sizes - There should be an extra parameter added to CreateAdvert() for specifying
BANNER TYPE. The first parameter 'type' is currently reserved and non-configurable, so perhaps this could be reworked? Without this functionality, we only get a standard 320x50 banner regardless of device or app layout. There are a lot of different banner sizes supported by Admob and other networks, namely:
BANNER (320x50), LARGE_BANNER (320x100), MEDIUM_RECTANGLE (300x250), FULL_BANNER (468x60), LEADERBOARD (728x90) and
SMART_BANNER (screen width x 32|50|90). A lot of potential is lost by not being able to use smart banners on tablets etc. This is a simple flag when using native Admob API and I feel should not be difficult to add to AGK.
Reference Link.
Ad Event Handling A lot of apps including the most popular ones reward the users in various ways if they view an ad, especially of the interstitial variety. Admob has an AdListener class that provides callback capabilities for:
onAdLoaded(), onAdFailedToLoad(int errorCode), onAdOpened();, onAdClosed() and
onAdLeftApplication(). Without this functionality, it is impossible to determine via AppGameKit if the user has viewed an ad etc. I could see these functions added to AppGameKit in a way similar to GetHTTPResponseReady(), whereby in the background this information is queried and a particular response code is returned depending on status (ad opened, ad closed, ad failed, etc.) so it can be handled appropriately. This could either be done via a general GetAdState() with returned values 0 = Pending, 1 = Ad Loaded, 2 = Ad Failed, 3 = Ad Opened, 4 = Ad Closed, and 5 = Ad Left Application [these return values would only be active for a single frame, much like GetPointerPressed()). Note that on ad failure, different error codes are returned that should also be available to AGK. The other option is to include specific functions for each event, such as
GetAdResponseLoaded(), GetAdResponseFailed(), GetAdResponseOpened(), GetAdResponseClosed() and
GetAdResponseLeftApplication(). The latter method would be less cryptic than the former but either would suffice. Chartboost offers similar event listeners that could be mapped to these as well.
Admob Reference Link.
Chartboost Reference Link.
With these commands the advertisement commands will go from "basic" to very versatile and open the doors for many new types of apps currently only possible using other frameworks or advanced Tier 2. Thank you.
P.S., It seems in my testing interstitial ads via Admob only appear on tablets. I was unsuccessful at getting any to load on my iPhone 6+.
