Android: Noiz2 1.3.0
I am play-testing version 1.3.0 just now. This has fast OpenGL renderer which should sort of a lot of the lag for the busier levels of the game.
The fast renderering of multiple lines and colours is handled using line and color arrays. The code for this has been put into the BulletML demo. If you are interested drawing lots of lines fast or OpenGL in general on Android then I would recommend you download the code and have a look at it. The demo features a switchable mechanism for flipping between OpenGL and Canvas.
I really wrestled with implementing the GL layer but I have definitely learnt a great deal and gained some confidence in my abilities to go on to put something together myself.
Android: Noiz2 – 1.2.4
Hi to everyone surfing in on their Android phones.
The good news is I have finally released Noiz2 to the Android Market.
Porting this application to Android has been a lot of work so I hope people like it. There is a complete explanation of the game here.
Leave me some feedback. Please be specific about ‘improvements’ to the graphics because I am not sure what that means. It’s a vector styled game!
Implemented
- Original game mode.
- Trackball support with configurable velocity.
- More optimisations of the graphics. I went in and removed my experimental OpenGL layer. I also re-factored the design to stop passing around the Canvas object. Not sure now what more I can do other than find out why the hell the OpenGL drawing is slower than the graphics Canvas.
Some items on the TODO list:
- High score table
- Accelerometer support.
- OpenGL renderer.
Android: BulletML
In the process of putting together a shoot-em-up style game for the Android phone I remembered coming across BulletML from Kenta Cho. I am familiar with Kenta from rRootage which was/is the coolest shooter for the jail-broken iPhone. Somehow it has never appeared on the app store which is pretty bizarre. Anyway I knew that Kenta had defined a mark-up language for defining all the crazy bullet patterns from his games. I had a look at the Java Applet here. It was written in java how hard could it be?
In the end it wasn’t too bad but I still haven’t a clue about Kentas code which is as opaque as it gets.
I can visualise how I will marry this to my game although I will have to write an OpenGL rendering layer.
- Main list
- Typical bullet sweep
- Another sweep
Demo source code here. I haven’t decided whether to put it up on the market yet in the demos section.
Update #1
I have rewritten graphics layer and implemented an OpenGL renderer for drawing the lines. Anyone interested in line graphics on Android might be interested in this. The line width feature under OpenGL does not work on the phone. It appears the width is fixed on the actual hardware to 1px.
Update #2
I got the profiler working. It looks like the application was linking to the opengl class in the SDK on the phone. Well, that’s what it looked like because when I changes the package name for the opengl stuff I ‘lifted’ from the v1.5 source it started working. Go figure.
The subversion source is kindof broken in the sense that I havce come across a bug in the int buffer. To make it work on the emulator comment out the lines marked ‘workaround’. More on this in later posts.