R&D

Making sense

2012-03-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today's effort was two fold:

Moved functions which should execute only onee per thread into their own class; function such as the ones to get current time (we don't want different objects on screen to think the time is different, even by millisecond) - it can only lead to confusion
Added 'bullets'. As the main object moves, by clicking anywhere else on screen fires off a bullet.

No picture today, but making an effort to have it checked in, as now the project is getting more complex.

Getting it moving.

2012-03-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

Added ability to move object around on android, it required a lot more effort than I expected, but works pretty well now. Next stop is to add menus, and make everything configurable - start with the size of the box. Following step is to think through the actual game, and the following step is to implement it.

Android app on Pandigital

2012-03-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

Something that works in emulator, may not work on the real machine.

It took a while to get it to work on my Pandigital. One challenge was to recompile the program with a lower version of SDK. The other challenge - not solved, is to stop it from freezing up.

The issue of freezing up is a bit irrelevant, I never meant to run the process on the real machine.

But the major task of developing something, and have it work on a physical device is a good accomplishment.

Collision Detection on Android

2012-03-01T19:56:00.000-08:00

Finished, hopefully, a test program for my colision - very simple one - detection.

Here's a screen shot:

The screen shot has yellow spots for unmarked spaces. The grey rectangle is a shape. And the green/red rectangle is another shape. The red square is where green rectangle intersects with grey rectangle.

Code on Hold

2012-02-28T20:05:00.000-08:00

Having a baby and switching jobs can put home-development on hold.

I recently started on some Android development. Currently working on a utility which would make it easier to write block-based games - the types of games where one item at a time can be in X/Y position.

Currently my test program looks like this, still in the process of adding buttons (on the bottom). Should I have looked for a generic way to add buttons? Maybe, but learning a lot by adding my own.

Chapter 3

2011-02-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

Completed chapter 3. There are some exercises left, but they involve some modifications of bitmaps, which isn't what I'm trying to learn. This was a very involved chapter, a lot of code, some new concepts, interesting over all.
Once again, had to debug on two occurrences, once to find a missing 'using' statement - C# just took over at that point, and "fixed" up (changed basically) what I was typing by changing the name of the class to a similar name. I was looking at the book not paying attention to the screen, and ended up with wrong class names, which don't have same constructors/methods.

Looking into the future, I'm thinking of getting OGRE 3D 1.7 Beginner's Guide
It seems to be the same type of a book (a tutorial of a kind), concentrating on 3D-development.

Sudoku enhanced

2011-02-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

Updated my rather bland text output of Sudoku to also print out data in a more graphical way. It isn't yet capable of taking input, yet displaying updated boxes in color helps find which boxes need updating.

The display was a copy from my attempted Minesweeper clone.

The logic was further enhanced to solve hard mode of http://www.websudoku.com Unfortunately it cannot yet crack the 'Evil' mode, as the second screen-shot shows. (all boxes with multiple values aren't solved, they list possible values)

Sudoku

2011-02-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

Sudoku is a fun game to play. I wanted to write a program to solve sudoku for a while now. Took some time and wrote up one today. It can solve easy and medium puzzles off http://www.websudoku.com/. I'm aware of a few limitations in it, so I don't expect it to solve all types of puzzles, but it does a lot.
I can always add brute-force for some extra hard puzzles, but I'd like to add as much smarts into it as I can before going down that road.

For now, I'm happy with the project the way it is, I give it this type of input file:

And this is the output:

I'm not a very graphical person, and haven't made a gui for it. That can be done later, hopefully I'll be back to my book tomorrow.

2011-02-08T18:42:00.000-08:00

Chapter 2. This one had a lot of code to type in. The game seems a lot more advanced as well, and I'm not familiar with it. An interesting occurrence has happened, there's is a bug. I presume, the issue is a typo I did, not a problem in the book, but instead of checking all code line by line, I am about to debug the issue.
What works: The main screen comes up. The game-screen also comes up.
What does not work: Clicking around does nothing, I believe I'm trying to play it correctly, but nothing is happening.

After a couple of hours debugging various issues, and finding two typo's I have made, finally gave up and did a diff of supplied code and what I typed in. The issue was I put a plus instead of a multiply sign. The final screen-shot shows how the game should look like. The game is now operational.

It was quite a learning experience, I'm convinced that in future, to debug GUI programs I'll need to have text representations of them, in order to make sure that logic is working, and the issue is in display. It's possible that with experience these things will become easier though.

2011-01-30T05:53:00.000-08:00

Been procrastinating a bit, finally went through chapter one.
Ended up with a little game, the chapter went through it step by step, explained the whole thing very well. The number of lines to write the game is surprisingly small. So far so good.

Starting on XNA

2011-01-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

I have recently ordered a book "XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Gu ide"

For a while I wanted to start on game development, but approached it by trying things in java and C++. However this time my approach will be to take advice from a book dedicated to game development, and apply my knowledge of programming to what I learn.

The book seems to be mostly a 2D book. For my first project of a real game, that is good. It will let me work out on 'game' aspects, and leave the worrying of how to do 3D game for the next phase.

Ultimately I'd like to finish a 2D game based on this book, and follow it up by learning 3D game-programming techniques.