Author: Chad Weisshaar

Rooting my Android phone

This morning I rooted my android G2x. The main motivation was curiosity, but there were a few things that I wanted to improve about my phone. T-Mobile didn’t pre-load too much junk onto the phone, but there was the T-Mobile app-pack and Mall, Nova and Tegra game stores, and the lite version of TeleNav. Also, to get a good ad-blocker you need to have root access.

So I took the plunge and rooted the phone. There was a point when I thought the phone was bricked, but it all worked out in the end.

Even without the mistakes that I made, I would say that the benefits do not justify the effort (at least for my phone). I am glad that I did it, but more for the experience than the end result.

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Southern Trip

We took a road trip through the south to visit friends. You can see all the pictures here. We had a good time and really enjoyed meeting N.R. and his family and visiting with Ian and Ingrid and meeting their daughters.

We traveled 4500 miles and tried to stop for a lot of roadside attractions. I wish that we could have spent more time with N.R. and Ingrid, but two weeks was already a long time to be on the road.

Here are some of the highlights:

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Games for sale!

We have the first set of multi-touch games ready for sale! We are going to be giving away “Bubble Defender” and selling “Concentration Sweep”, “Temple Raiding”, “Yacht” and “Solitaire Dice”. Initially, they will be for sale  at Peau Productions and bundled with tables sold by Mesa Mundi.

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Wiktionary

When creating the Writer’s Block game, I needed a list of valid words. This is a fairly common problem in programming and so I was surprised that I couldn’t find a simple word list available online. There are plenty of online dictionaries, downloadable dictionaries that you have to pay for and word lists without definitions, but I couldn’t find a free downloadable list of words with definitions. Except Wiktionary.

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Writer’s Block

I have been working on a new game for the multitouch table called “Writer’s Block”. In the game, players will compete to find words in a 4×4 or 5×5 grid of letters. 

The players have three minutes to find all the words they can. Words are scored based on length and if multiple players find the same word it scores zero points.

There have a few interesting problems to solve when creating this game:

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Solitaire Dice AI

I spent the past week building an AI for Solitaire Dice. William created this game for the touch table from the Sid Sackson book “A gamut of games”. The game plays by rolling five dice each round. You pick one die to be the reject and then make two scoring pair from the remaining four dice. Each round you reject a number (1-6) and then score two pairs (2-12). Once you have rejected three different numbers, you always have to reject one of those three if possible. If the five dice don’t contain any of your rejects, you don’t pick a reject and make two scoring pairs from the five dice. Once you have rejected a number 8 times the game is over. Your score is based on how many times you have taken each scoring pair during the game. You lose 200 points if you have scored a number 1-4 times. 0 or 5 times is zero points. You get points for each score >5 and <10. So, the first time you pick a number it cost you 200 points, once you have taken the number five times you are back to zero. Each additional score gives you points based on the number 2 or 12=100, 3 or 11=70, 4 or 10=60, 5 or 9=50, 6 or 8=40, and 7=30. It is a fun game that you get better at as you play.

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Hansa Teutonica – Post Mortum

Hansa Teutonica is nearing completion and I wanted to capture some of the lessons that we learned during development. Overall, the game has turned out to be a much larger project that we originally anticipated. We are very happy with the design that we ended up with and we think that future games can use the same design. The game is currently playable except for placing an office to the side of an exiting city. There are also some user interface improvements to make and quite a bit of testing yet to do. But the majority of the code is done.

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Game day and Action game prototype

We hosted a game day this Saturday and got to show the multi-touch table to our gaming friends. There were about 15 of us and the table was a big hit. We didn’t have Hansa Teutonica complete, but we did have Wits and Wagers, Gem Hoarder, Yahtzee, Texas Holdem, Concentration Sweep, Solitaire Dice, and two action game prototypes. People seemed to enjoy the speed that games of Wits and Wagers and Gem Hoarder could be played compared to the physical versions. And we were surprised by how addictive the action game prototypes were. Even though they lacked a lot of polish and features, they got a lot of play.

We took some video of the action and will get that edited and posted on youtube soon. We wanted to have a video to show off when we pitch game designers on the idea of converting and selling their games. I am planning to contact the designers of “Hansa Teutonica”, “Brass”,  “7 Wonders”, and “The Resistance” this week to see if we can get permission to make their games for the touch table.

On Thursday and Friday of last week I started working on a simple action game to test the responsiveness of the table in a fast paced game. I created a simple game where players use virtual arrow keys to steer a spaceship around a board and fire at the other ships. My first discovery was that it was too hard to release a virtual arrow key. On a physical keyboard it is obvious when you have released a key, but on the virtual keyboard, it seems like the key should be released as soon as your finger comes up off the screen. But with the IR detector above the TV, you have to raise your finger about 1/4″ before the touch is lost. So it would feel like you had stopped pressing a direction, but the game was still registering the touch.

So I replaced the virtual arrow keys with a virtual control wheel where you touch and leave your finger down to steer. The ship turns in the direction that your finger is placed and it’s speed is based on how far your finger is toward the edge. It works significantly better than the keys did, but is still not perfect.

By Saturday, I had two types of weapons, one for taking out shields and the other for damaging hull. When destroyed, the ships would quickly re-spawn.

When we tested the game with the full eight players, we saw some problems with the center player’s touches not being detected. The touch sensor requires visibility to three sides to register, so if there are already touches on both sides, a new touch will not register. To solve this, I will probably need to put the control areas of the center player at a slightly different position than the areas of the left and right players.

Since the game was popular, I will probably add a few more features and polish the graphics. I’ll probably add some obstacles, different ship types/attributes, ship collisions, power-ups and the ability for players to drop out and join the in middle.

Scrolling table body

In the practice log web application, I had a large table of data to display. I wanted to table to scroll, but I didn’t want the table header row to scroll off the screen. Especially since users will be looking at the most recent data at the bottom of the table most of the time.

The key to making this work is to put the table into a containing div and to set a hard coded height for the table and header. The containing div needs to have a specific height and an overflow of hidden. The table body needs to have a height that is smaller than the containing div by the height of the header. It needs to have a display of block, overflow of auto and vertical-align of middle:

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