Jelly Bean LWP Retrospective

My brother and I have been working on a game for the upcoming OUYA console.  We got a little burnt out on a particular design issue and needed a breather, a small fun project to lift our spirits.  So we decided to try our hand at a Live Wallpaper for Android.  1 week later and here we are, you can see the results on the Android market:

Introducing ShiVa Android All In One (AAIO)

What is this?

This is an open source project that I’ve started to help ShiVa developers get the latest/greatest Android SDK implementations.  The goal for this project is to be a single Android project that contains the implementations for any Android SDK that you could possibly care about.

There are 2 pieces to this project.  The Android code is where the SDK implementations live as combinations of Java and JNI (for interacting with ShiVa).  The ShiVa project is where SDK specific AI implementations go.  So for every SDK implemented, there is an associated ShiVa AI model that exposes the functionality needed to use the SDK from inside ShiVa.

Why did I make it?

I often see folks posting large tutorials in the forums detailing how to implement various SDKs in Android.  These tutorials are awesome and the community members involved in writing them deserve tons of credit.  What happens when you start a new project though?  Do you comb back over the forums, find the 3 SDK tutorials of interest and start copying/pasting all over again?  What happens when the SDK is updated with breaking changes and the tutorial author is busy?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to copy/paste any of this code?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all you had to do was select the SDKs that you wanted to use?  I answer yes to these questions and this is why I have started this project.

Android ListView Contents Disappearing

This image says it all, where have the titles gone?

Sometimes you encounter issues on Android that seem so blatantly simple, you can’t imagine that you are the first person to have hit them.  This seemed like a simple case where my TextView items were not being rendered “sometimes” when I scrolled my ListView.

Sony Smartwatch – SDK Impressions

I recently received a Sony Smartwatch as part of Sony’s promotion.  I haven’t been this excited about a watch since I was rocking my Casio Calculator Watch back in 2nd grade.

Unlike many SDKs, my first impression when peaking inside the Smart Extensions SDK was that Sony actually has android developers employed!  This excited me since many SDKs feel like Android is a 2nd thought entirely.  Overall the SDK is fairly straight-forward in that reading accelerometer data, getting screen tap coordinates and drawing to the screen are all simple tasks with well commented sample projects.

There were a couple features that I thought were missing and that felt foreign:

• Having to write button collision detection from scratch rather than using button click handlers
• Being unable to use XML selectors
• Being unable to use other Android UI widgets like ProgressDialog

I was able to hack a reasonable implementation for the first two of these.  I believe this implementation makes it far easier to craft a basic Smartwatch app that responds to tap events.  Read on for more details.

ShiVa Native Projects for Android – A Guide for the Forgetful

This article covers the basics of exported Android ShiVa projects.  If you are trying to integrate Java or C libraries, for instance the ScoreLoop API, the following information could come in handy.  I had to stumble through this process with the scattered bits of documentation and I get tired of re-learning it every time I start a new project.  The article assumes basic familiarity with Eclipse, Java, C, Android and JNI.

Most of this content is based on the file that Stonetrip provides, on windows it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Stonetrip\ShiVa Authoring Tool\Data\Windows\Windows\Build\S3D SDK – Readme.txt

Why App Stores SUCK – Segregation

I was recently going through the Blackberry developer forums and stumbled across a thread that is all too common. A developer had an app on the market and was doing well until a negative comment was posted and sales stopped.

It’s possible that the app in question wasn’t any good and the loss of sales had nothing to do with the comment. . . but, for the sake of this article, I am siding with the developer because when it comes right down to it, app stores kind of suck.

Get the Tide out because it’s time to air some dirty laundry.

Design Diary – Shiva 3D Mobile Optimization

As we are narrowing in on the release of our game, we turned our attention on the game performance.  Our low end target is an Android HTC Inspire, mid-range is an HP Pre Plus and super high-range is an HP Touchpad.

We were having an issue with 1 scene in-particular where on the Touchpad, we were consistently dropping to 15 fps. For a dual core beast, this was bad.

This article is partly about the debug process and highlights 3 areas we found where we gained performance.

How To Make Graphics Without Being An Artist

If you were to look at the following drawing, you might think it to be the doodles of a 4 or 5-year-old child.  I mean, what the heck is it?  Is it a crazy alligator crawling on a globe?  Is it a bat carrying a piece of fruit?  No and no, it’s clearly a dragon perched atop a magical ball and quite clearly the sad artistic maximum of this 31-year-old man.

A dragon, ferociously perched on top of a magical ball of epic power.

As an artist, I have clearly failed.  But where artistry has failed, geekery has prevailed.  Even with my lack of artistic ability, I am able to take the previous sketch and turn it into the below image: