I’ve rewritten the spawning system, so now you find other ships at particular locations. Previously (as some of you figured out) I just flung them in from off screen to maintain a population and present an appropriate level of challenge. Now you have to go find it. This change is interesting, it’s had a pretty big impact on the game, and I think it’s nearly finished… but it makes for a terrible screenshot.
Something else I did, which I’m hoping will excuse this image, was build a little air timer app for my phone. Accelerometers are affected by gravity, so using them to read anything other than the orientation of a static or constantly moving object is quite difficult. Luckily this means they’ll only ever read 0 when in freefall, and as a snowboarder this is something I’m quite interested in. Now, thanks to the Android Scripting Environment, I can throw my phone up in the air, catch it, then hear a robotic voice report how long my phone was airborne. In a couple of weeks I’ll stuff my phone into my jacket pocket, and it will tell me how long I am airborne. I’m tempted to have it also reports impacts, but if I land on my head I’m not sure I’ll want to hear about it from a robotic voice in my pocket.
<3 Farbs
So you’ve effectively created an endgame – where challenges are gone when you’ve cleared out all of your enemies?
Or Space stations producing small units TIE-esque?
Can’t wait.
Haha. I mucked about with ASE back when I was much more interested in Lua than I am now. Pretty cool stuff. I’m guessing you loaded in the Python module? :) If my phone had a real keyboard I’d probably still be messing with it, but on-screen keyboards suck for more involved inputs. It’s sort of annoying how few stylish Androids come with real keyboards, and how few Androids are readily available down-under. :S
heck android phones are tough to get over here too. the carrier system in America is terrible. you pretty much have to switch carriers if you really want a certain phone. though im not sure how it works down there.
how does your app differentiate between the downward acceleration you get while going down the mountian and then the change in acceleration while you go up a jump? Also for the sensor to read zero wouldnt you need to be at terminal velocity which would probably mean you should have a parachute with you.?
Yup, python it was. Apparently some of the other languages get access to the full API though, so I might have to branch out.
Google were kind enough to give all GDC attendees a free phone, so all I had to do was swap my sim card into it. Otherwise I’d still be using my six year old Nokia :)
@ryan: Actually at terminal velocity the accelerometer should register 1G, since you’d be gravitating towards the Earth but not accelerating. I hope not to test that though :P You can imagine an accelerometer as a ball in a cage, suspended on all sides by springs. If you put the cage on a table the ball will sag towards the bottom (registering gravity). If you were to drop the cage then the ball and the cage would accelerate at the same rate, so the ball would move to the center of the cage (registering 0).
yea it was early and with no coffee even. how are you having it determine air time? extreme positive acceleration until extreme negative acceleration?
Nope, it’s even easier than that – I just start timing at ~0G and stop timing at not ~0G.
You just have to make sure that the phone is at the centre of gravity for whatever gnarly spin trick you are pulling off to not induce a centrifugal force ;)
Heh, you’ll have to teach me a gnarly spin trick first Grant.
Are you going to ride with us again this year?