Schwartz Engine

Beware when you have some code that draws in a graphical context of some kind that can be called from two different places at the same time or called twice so that the first call not is finished when the second is called.

I have been hunting for a bug that crashed my game and simply closed the App with no warning due to a construction like this. Use Locks objects combined with synchronize in your renderers, handlers or whatever to indicate if they are active and not must be called to create some kind of race condition. Anyway bug solved and the App has been enforced and is now more robust…

I got the solution and improved it at stack overflow.

And during this fixing process I revisited and fixed another annoying bug that have been irritating me, even though it is a small thing, that players not will see unless they where told. So all in all I’m almost ready…

Finally I’ve played the game through once again, I’m close to finishing. Just need to investigate a few quirks. There is some game testing on the power of monsters making it unbalanced and other details like that. Nearing completion is what I say!

Along the way the old games from the C64 and Amiga days have inspired me.
I’ve read a lot of old stories on how differnt games where made back then to inspire the finishing and construction of the architecture of this game. There is a lot out there. The story on the rise and fall of the Amiga Computer, the creation of games like Dungeon Master, Maniac Mansion, Exploding Fist I and II for C64 and others have given me great ideas for this retro 2D tile RPG.

Read som of it here:

A History of the Amiga

The Creation of Dungeon Master

I bought a refurbished PC to try and run some kind of Linux, to see if I could get out of the seemingly stagnating Windows OS which has started to annoy me. Things seem slow and cumbersome on the Windows platform, a new machine is fast enough to begin with, but quickly seem to slow down from updates and bloat ware. So away I went and made an installation USB stick with the Ubuntu distribution.

I had a system up and running in less than 20 minutes. The Windows 7 on the old refurbished thing was gone and I have a speedy system, that boots in 30- seconds and shuts in 5- seconds. It’s easy and intuitive and it has become my preferred rig to develop Apps on.

At one time I accidentally thrashed the system, because I’m such a Linux newbie. I was up and running in less than 45 minutes with my development setup. That could never be done using Windows – The alternative OS has its quirks, but on a flat distribution you have the Word, Excel and Power Point equivalent from LibreOffice for free – Go Linux I say!

But hey!

Kudos to Microsoft, in Denmark they have managed to make Windows the mandatory OS when buying a PC, that is also called monopoly but nobody cares about that. It’s almost impossible to get a PC without Windows pre-installed. You have to insist to avoid the dreaded Windows installation, and you might even have to pay extra to avoid it, crazy isn’t it?!

The last item in my backlog this late hour is to replay the game again, to review and check for typos in the plot.
I’ve also enhanced the game experience with some extra graphics and want to see how it looks. So on me bike playing it again…

Last night I made material and changed the packet name to comply with Google’s requirements for Apps in their market. A tough fight changing an already set package name in an Android project.
But I finally came through, the problem is that you have to make sure that the old package name is changed to the new one in your code!
So as help for other lost souls to change package name of an Android App, do this:

– Change the main Java code package in your project and resolve any references
– Change the package field in the Android Manifest file
– Ensure and code reference to the R class is using the new package name
– Change the old package name to the new one in your code!

The last point had me hunting for a couple of hours, but there’s software development for you…

I’ve been forgetting all about this blog and since I’m old School I’ll get back to writing about things I’m working on. Recently I’ve been finishing an android game and I am readying it for the market It uses old retro style things like the floppy. The App is a tribute to the guys that invented the Amiga computer and seemed to have gotten low balled by incompetent/greedy management at commodore. It is a retro tile adventure/rpg inspired by old retro games like Bards’ Tale, Ultima and Dungeon Master, more to come…