November 2006 archives
Mobile Update
Work on porting the existing code to the Nokia 6600 has begun. While it was initially thought that this would be a more or less straigh forward process as it turns out there are a few complications. Typical huh ;). In its current state the code runs under the wireless toolkit emulator as well as the emulator that EclipseME uses. However the Nokia 6600 must have more robust error detection as it fails to run the main application.
After a little debugging it was realised that not including an "others" clause in a switch statement was one of the reasons that the program was failing to execute. Much of the functionality of the game has been removed in order to debug the code and is being added back in incrementally after it has been tested. So far the map and level structure seems to be working correctly as does the code that controls the player drawing and movement. Additionally the code for the scrolling buffer has been tested and debuged. Improvements include not allowing the player to move while the scrolling process is taking place. Thus any previous errors that may have occured when the player tried to step back through the room he just came from when the buffer is still scroling have been eliminated.
The next stage in this process is to build the enemy functionality back in. Currently this is causing the phone to complain on two accounts resulting in an "application error" while this does not hault or crash the game in anyway it does stop all enemy movement. Changes to this area of the code will include restructuring the methods that initiate the enemy AI as well as trying to debug and improve the path finding algorithms.
Finally on a side note, the game tiles have been reduced from 16x16 pixels to 10x10 pixels. This was done so that an entire room is visible on the phone. In order to resolve this it will be necessary to find some way of accessing a full screen mode on the mobile phone. This way the borders and menu code will be removed until the user specifies so. At which point the game can be paused while he selects what should happen, for example exiting the application.