University / Red Leaf / Electric Rain

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Yet again I've casted my blog aside for other forms of social media, I never thought I would regularly post tweet on Twitter. But I am, and it is useful (although mostly it's for inane comments). So where to start?

University
Same old, same old. Except more coursework. More better lecturers this term and I've been going to the majority of my lectures, I'm enjoying studying half of machine intelligence (the algorithms side, not so much Turing Test et al), Operating Systems is enjoyable - very, very awesome lecturer but he's not so great at marking coursework on time, though I can forgive that since he's awesome. After learning about concurrency in OS, I've managed to grasp a firm understanding of the basics of threads (joins, livelocks, deadlocks..).

Android development in Java has been great, the coursework for which was to implement a game in the vain of Lunar Lander. Admittedly I dislike the game Lunar Lander so this coursework would have been way more fun had I been in the previous year as they asked to implement a version of Breakout. Although I can't really complain because it was the most enjoyable coursework ever (except doing a PID I mean that was fucking unbelievably fun...)

As I'm writing this I just realised that I should have put lots of cats in my Lunar Lander game, because cats are awesome and everyone loves cats. Putting that aside, a screenshot of my Lunar Lander game is below:

The source code for it I'm not too proud of, I got a bit tired of it and distracted by other things (which I'll get to later in this post).

Compilers - I loved that in the last week until the deadline I managed to combine all my progress made over 2/3 of year which was my custom language Esper being compiled to C. And it actually passed all the test runs I put it through!

Databases, good lectures, terrible coursework... I really hate how the University train us on Oracle products in order to get money from Oracle, as that means we had to use their implementation of SQL in their HORRIBLE, SLOW, SLUGGISH sqldeveloper. Not fun at all.

And I'll finish this section with a final note: Group work sucks so, so, so much.

Red Leaf
In the previous section I mentioned that I was distracted from my Android coursework, this was the reason why!

Anyway LOST agreed (BEST BAND EVER <3) that I could do this for them and have been working my ass off on it (except today - I've been eating KitKats and watching my favourite anime from years ago, Air Gear). I made a Twitter account for the game in order to tweet progress of the game, as if this ends up being for my Final Year Project then I'll need a logbook and I found I was much better at tweeting updates than writing them.

https://twitter.com/AlexDiru/
https://twitter.com/RedLeafProject/

Above are my two twitter accounts, the first is my personal one and the latter is for the game. However, since I'm now using version control for the project tweets of progress have been replaced by commit logs. I save tweeting for more major updates now (as opposed to minor bug fixes that no-one cares about - implying they care anyway!).

Less of Twitter and more about the game, so far it is a playable game, although songs never end so you have to manually exit them. (Note: It helps if you've played Tap Tap Revenge to understand this paragraph). I have star power implemented - currently it only requires a streak of 4 star notes but I can easily fix that to 10. Tap and hold notes are implemented. Scoring, accuracy and multiplier is done.

The next step I think is to convert the rendering to OpenGL as it will be quicker and allow for 3D graphics (potentially). For this I am going to refer to the book "Beginning Android Games" has that has decent code and examples for everything Android games. But before I do this, I want to have all the basic gameplay nailed down and then fork the project just in case it all goes tits up (I know I could revert, but things can get messy with reverting).

rdle in this project is actually making the notes to match the songs. Currently I have coded up an (albeit basic) importer to allow Stepmania songs to be imported, this means I (or anyone else kind enough to help) would be able to use the editor Stepmania provides which is pretty decent. Also since Stepmania has a sizeable userbase, if it comes to it, hopefully I will be able to pay someone to create the songs (and hopefully it won't be too expensive).

Enough words! Screenshots (ordered in progression)!

Electric Rain
This was an RPG I stopped developing a few months ago. I didn't get too far, but I had a working battle system and you were able to talk to NPCs who moved around. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future as it feels a waste to let it go. But for now, let's make it open source! If you do use it in anything please credit "Alexander L. Spedding" with a link to my github/Facebook.

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