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.
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:
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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In my previous entries, I’ve discussed a few things that caught me off guard while learning iPhone development. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve picked up an Android device to dig into that platform a bit and probably will spend less time playing with iPhone development. Before I move too far away from iPhone, I wanted to wrap up the remaining differences I found interesting between the iPhone and Java platforms.
I’m continuing to make slow forward progress with my DAAP-based music player for the iPhone. My most recent changes have taken this in the direction of being much more like the standard music player functionality on the iPhone. In particular, I’ve switched over to using a tab view controller for the major perspectives of viewing the music database.
Looking back to my last post way back in October it is pretty clear when things started getting crazy at work. The team survived and managed to finish another awesome version of mFoundry’s mBanking product. These days I’m doing more management and less coding, but I’m definitely still a geek. Given that iPhone applications are all the rage in the industry, I’ve been trying to learn my way around iPhone development. During the process of learning, I’ve noticed a few things that have caught me off guard compared to Java. I hope to post a few of those things in the days and weeks to come that may help other Java programmers. In the meantime, I thought I would share some about the project I’ve been playing with to learn.
Given Motorola’s push into the Android space, it comes as no surprise that they are trimming down the number of developers on the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project. MTJ project lead, Christian Kurzke, announced via the mailing list that three of the key “Motorola sponsored” developers have been reassigned to a different project and will no longer be sponsored to develop the Eclipse MTJ features. The good news is that Gustavo, Diego and David have expressed interest in continuing to be involved as individual contributors. In addition, Jon Deardon from Research In Motion will most likely be joining the list of official contributors very soon.
As Christian pointed out via his email, now would be an excellent time to consider getting involved in the Eclipse MTJ project. Even something as simple as being involved on the mailing list can help us out. If you are a mobile developer using Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java, consider contributing a patch to provide a cool new feature or to fix the bug that annoys you the most. Not a developer, but still want to contribute? We can always use help with documentation and project marketing. Pitch in and lend a hand!
I have just made available the first public release (version 0.5.0) of the ZBerry interactive fiction application. This release works pretty well, but is definitely rough around the edges. I hope people get some amusement despite any bugs. More details about installation and usage can be found on the ZBerry Documentation page.
ZBerry Game Play
Please take this for what it is worth… a silly little hobby project of mine that may or may not continue. If you really like this, feel free to comment. If you find bugs, source code patches are welcome, but complaints are not. My hope is that is that it is worth more than its price (FREE) but given that I’m making nothing from this I hope that everyone can understand there is absolutely no support implied or available.
I have been told that the replacement Macintosh BlackBerry PPPD is no longer necessary for systems that have Snow Leopard installed. In fact, it sounds like installing the patched pppd version can actually cause issues on Snow Leopard systems.
If you have Snow Leopard on your system, please do not install the patched version of PPPD.
I will keep the replacement package available for those like myself that are still running Leopard on their systems. In addition, there is a version built for Tiger.