Wednesday Post 8

1) Lets look at the list I made for last week and see what I got done:

Scoring system
I implemented the scoring system, as described in the design document, but have not been able to test it yet. Next time I will test it with the game pad, which is why it resides in the "verify" column of the scrum board.

Investigation of skinnable swing elements
Custom LAF (look and feels) are surprisingly easy to integrate; just adding them to the classpath and a single call from the UIManager. However, for some reason the custom fonts are not working, so I have to investigate that further, which is now a task on the board.

High Scores/Profile integration
This part I started, but realized that I have no architecture for high scores besides the personal bests saved in the profile; these bests don't make sense either because they do not differentiate between difficulty levels. What I need to do is develop a completely new class that interfaces with the profile to not only record personal bests (on both difficulties) but allow comparison between other profiles and other bests. This will be the focus for next time.

Options Gamestate
I could not think of a single option that is absolutely necessary to the game, so I'm just skipping this for now.

Select level gamestate
I got this part all done except for displaying the personal bests, which is part of the problem from above. That's an easy fix though. Also, I can now select the difficulty levels.

2) Next week, I need to develop a new structure for high scores that make them easy to retrieve, sort, and compare. It will need to integrate with the profile. Along with this will be the end of song gamestate, which basically accumulates game data, calculates score, and reports it to the user and to the high score class.

If I have time, I need to write a python script to assist me in creating the song data files. The overall goal is to have a working example song by the end of the semester, with working profiles and high scores.


3) Nothing today.

Wednesday Post 7

1) Today I worked on getting gamepad input to work, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I'm using a library called JXInput, which sadly is not cross platform. I went ahead and set up some dummy "slide positions" for my normal gamepad so I could detect successful notes. What I thought would be super difficult really wasn't, and now its just a matter of optimizing the code so that the input is as accurate as possible.

2) As the semester wanes, the goal is to get a lot of the functional elements of the game done, and next semester will be primarily graphics and sound. The main things I need to do are:

Scoring system
Investigation of skinnable swing elements
High Scores/Profile integration
Options Gamestate
Select level gamestate


Over Holiday break I plan to finish up on the controller and get that fully integrated. I believe I can finish up what I have here in the next 4 weeks.

3) At the beginning, when I was switching around with engines, I thought it was a giant waste of time. One good thing that came from it though was I learned how to integrate jar libraries into my classpath and netbeans project, something I had no idea how to do before the engine shuffle. Today, I think this (and a little bit of luck with the documentation) is what I credit the success of JXInput.

Wednesday Post 6

1)  Today I made the progress bar, which proved to have its problems with the scaling. I also created a bitmap font class to create and display scalable bitmap fonts.

2)  Next week I'm going to finish up the HUD, then I'll go on to getting joystick input.

3)  Here is the bitmap font code :

package seniorproj;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.awt.image.*;
import java.awt.*;

public class BitmapFont {

    private HashMap img_list;
    private int cell_size;

    public BitmapFont(int size, Color c){
        img_list=new HashMap();
        cell_size=size;
        //numbers
        for(int xx=48;xx<=57;xx++){
            BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
            Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
            g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
            g2.setPaint(c);
            g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
            img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
        }
        //uppercase
        for(int xx=65;xx<=90;xx++){
            BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
            Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
            g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
            g2.setPaint(c);
            g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
            img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
        }
        //lowercase
        for(int xx=97;xx<=122;xx++){
            BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
            Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
            g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
            g2.setPaint(c);
            g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
            img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
        }


    }

    public void render_string(Graphics2D g2,int x, int y, String str, float rw, float rh){
        for(int xx=0;xx

Wednesday Post 5

1)  Today was a productive day, as I got the entire profile gamestate completed (add, remove, select), made the graphics scalable, and began working on the HUD.  I also made a credits notification box, which took a single line of code.

2)  Next week will be a 100% focus on the Play gamestate.  I want to focus on designing the layout and basic look of the play field without getting hung up on graphics too much.  The goals for the end of next week will be to have blobs moving, a basic backgroudn designed with the game in mind, and a hud containing score, multiplier, and a progress bar.

3)  Came across my first bug today that I'm leaving in for now.  It seems that when I clear the text area and then add text directly afterward, the window freezes.  For now it just appends the text area with the profile information, which is good enough for now.  I'm glad I let it go after working on it, so I could move on to more important things.