Et-Setera

A quick “from the trenches” post. Recently I’ve been digging in to the Android camera a bit. The Android SDK samples have an example of how to wire up a live preview from the camera on the device directly to a Surface view. Unfortunately, this fails miserably on my Samsung Captivate with a repeating error similar to the following.

07-04 12:23:45.101: ERROR/copybit(2230): Error in VIDIOC_STREAMON
07-04 12:23:45.101: ERROR/copybit(2230): Fail : v4l2_stream_on()
07-04 12:23:45.106: ERROR/copybit(2230): stretch_copybit::sec_stretch fail : ret=-5

This had me stymied for a bit until I took a look at the awesome zxing (Zebra Crossing) project where I stumbled on to a solution for this problem. (All credit goes to their developers). The code in their CameraManager class and CameraConfigurationManager class goes through a number of gyrations to pick an appropriate preview size. Using that code allows the Captivate to properly render a live preview.

Thanks to the zxing crew for this little tidbit, as I’m not sure I would have figured this one out on my own.

It is a good thing that I’m not trying to make my living with this little project, given the slow forward progress. However, there is continued progress on the collision detection compared to my last update Pingus On Android – Early Collision Detection.

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In Part 2 of this series I had finally managed to get the primary scene ground objects into place. Since then, I’ve made some reasonable progress on the game. The following demo shows some of the initial collision detection working.
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In my first entry (Pingus on Android), I talked about my initial efforts to port the free game called Pingus to run on top of Android using AndEngine.  At that point, I was struggling to properly place sprite images when the sprite is rotated 90 degrees (and presumably 270).  All of the work being done was at a zoom level that allowed the complete scene to be displayed on the device.  Because of the extreme zoom, it was impossible to see the details and therefore to notice when things weren’t properly aligned.  It seemed like I was getting close with this alignment, but the numbers were not something that could be calculated based on available information:

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As I’ve continued hiring at mFoundry (if you live in the Bay Area, check us out), I’ve been very busy non-coding.  As usual, that implies the need for a non-work programming project.  As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started digging into Android programming.  I decided it would be interesting to try to do a game of some sort.  Given that I have zero skill with graphics, I had to cheat a bit.  I’m attempting to build an Android version of the Pingus game using the graphics and levels from their source code and the very cool Android game engine AndEngine.
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