Month: February 2012

Practice Log – Android+MultiUser completed

The changes to the PracticeLog application and the associated android app are completed. They both access the database on my website through the php interface.

I have created a simple user system:

  1. When you create a new user, I store the username and email along with an encrypted password and generated GUID in my user table.
  2. When a user logs in, the given password is encrypted and compared to the stored password. If correct, the GUID is returned.
  3. The other tables are accessed by the users GUID.

The C# changes were fairly simple. I created a login/new-user dialog and left the local database code so that someone could use the program in a offline mode if they didn’t like the idea of logging into my website.

The Android app was a much bigger job. I was able to use all built-in GUI elements, but the life-cycle issues were much more serious than they were in my first Android application. I didn’t want the user to have to log in every time, so I store the users GUID in the application’s configuration data. I also needed to preserve both the timer’s start time and the entered but unsaved practice time when the application is killed. I learned how to prevent the screen rotation from happening and learned how to store the downloaded data from the web during a screen rotation.

Testing the app was a hassle because my phone loses its connection to eclipse after a few seconds. This is probably a problem with the virtual machine that I am using to do the development with. If I had it to do over, I would go ahead and install java and eclipse on my main machine.

I am still considering releasing this application and app, but would like to figure out the ad model for the android app.

Here is what the app looks like:

Hansa Teutonica

Now that we are getting a multitouch table, it is time to write some games for it.

William has already written GemHoarder and we have decided that the next game will be Hansa Teutonica.  It is a relatively new game that we really enjoy. The game doesn’t have a lot of different cards or exceptions that make a conversion difficult.

We are going to write the game with the Torque 2D game engine. William has already incorporated TUIO events into the engine. It is a C++ engine and I will be creating the back-end game model. The game is turn based, and on each player’s turn they can perform 2-5 actions. We know that we will need to be able to undo actions because the player may click in the wrong place, or just change their mind. The later happens regularly in the physical version. So I am going to create a model of the players and the board and then a move system that modifies the model. Finally, there will be some kind of game-runner that interfaces with the GUI to find out what the player wants to do, constructs the move, has the move apply itself, and then saves the move so that it can be undone.

I am also looking forward to trying out some of the new features in C++ 11. My previous C++ application was written with Visual Studio 2008 because the CLI/.NET intellisense is broken in VS 2010. Since I wont be using any of the managed code for this project, I can use VS 10 which supports most of C++ 11. The features that I am planning to try out are the “for each” statement and the Lambda functions.