Android and game play

So I've been annoyed at getting this running on the iPhone. While I love the iPhone, to do this I'm having to learn a new os, a new keyboard w(hich I'm about to break!), a new dev env, a new way of doing apps (on a phone) and a new language. Plus I'm off my uber-dev machine and on a single screen Macbook Prop. Parts of which I enjoy, but I have limited time and I want to get this running, so its driving me a bit crazy!

Sooooo.... It occurred to me to look at Android. Very cool - it's in java, which is a lot closer to c++ and c#, and dev tool of choice is Android - which is what I've been doing Google app engine stuff in (the back end for PB). So I'm already pretty comfy doing apps for Android :)

I've got the sdk and spent last weekend working on the comm. Which was a huge pain as XML support in Android sucks - but I can now list news for a user and list bombs the user has place. Very cool! Of course it's all running on the emulator, but it does work. I will likely get the new iPhone next month and jail break my old one and install Android so I an test and play the game. Hope i can get a min data play as I don't want to have to rely on wireless.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Explode time

One issue I've been dealing with is driving actions in the game,specifically bombs blowing up. I was originally going to use a cron job, but the lowest time resolution it has it 1 minute. This obviously isn't fast enough. I started to look at using Tasks as a timer - do the task, which presses bombs and then starts a new task in 3 seconds or some such. Did work, but then it still had lag - and each task was taking too long if a bunch of bombs go off at one.

So instead I am using tasks to do each bomb - when a player places a bomb a task is created to run at the explode time. When it hits, if the bomb still hasn't gone off it will just process that bomb. Works great!