Currently on the slate is:
A minor update to Aquarium adding a new fish and background, and a fix for a very rare texture loading crash.
A new live wallpaper celebrating the mighty ladybug
I have a tentative plan to get home-screen scrolling into Aquarium, but am a bit hesitant as it'll mean doubling the size of the background images, which means more memory usage. Probably not the end of the world, but it doesn't excite me...
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Galactic Core v1.4
- New Feature: Camera moves when switching home screens
- New Feature: Camera Speed pref
Touch sensitivity is still in place, and will interact with the home-screen motion more or less reasonably. If you have both features enabled, you'll get up/down motion based on screen touches and left/right motion based on your current home screen. The speed at which the camera moves between the points is controlled by a pref now as well, so you can make it pretty quick if you prefer.
I've gotten one e-mail from someone saying the home-screen sensitivity isn't working for him, but on examination haven't worked out why yet. The same person says it worked in Silhouette, so I probably can't blame the phone here, but comments on the app's marketplace listing indicate it's working for other people. The biggest differences from Silhouette are that Galactic Core has more preferences governing camera behavior, but as he's using the free version those should all be at default, which worked fine when I tested them. I'll take another stab at that tonight.
- New Feature: Camera Speed pref
Touch sensitivity is still in place, and will interact with the home-screen motion more or less reasonably. If you have both features enabled, you'll get up/down motion based on screen touches and left/right motion based on your current home screen. The speed at which the camera moves between the points is controlled by a pref now as well, so you can make it pretty quick if you prefer.
I've gotten one e-mail from someone saying the home-screen sensitivity isn't working for him, but on examination haven't worked out why yet. The same person says it worked in Silhouette, so I probably can't blame the phone here, but comments on the app's marketplace listing indicate it's working for other people. The biggest differences from Silhouette are that Galactic Core has more preferences governing camera behavior, but as he's using the free version those should all be at default, which worked fine when I tested them. I'll take another stab at that tonight.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Aquarium v1.12
- Bug Fix: Fish getting "stuck"
I'm not sure how often this actually happens, but I have gotten a couple reports of fish "swimming off" then never coming back. Going through the fish AI (heh) with a fine tooth comb, I did find a couple possibilities and managed to reproduce one of them. Basically, when fish turn around, they didn't have any deceleration on their turn speed. It was possible that depending on your framerate, they could overshoot their goal angle, try again, overshoot it again, etc. I know this could happen for a long time if your framerate was low, though I've only ever seen it when running debug, personally (with a <10 framerate). I fixed this by having their turn speed decelerate when they got close to their goal angle.
I also found a situation where if their movement delta had a length of 0, a division I was doing could end up NaN (not a number), which would work its way into their origin, which would mean future updates would forever be invalid. This always resulted in the fish being teleported to the center of the screen though, so shouldn't be the same problem as them swimming off and vanishing.
Either way, I closed up a couple of holes here, we'll see if I get any more "my fish swam off and never came back" reports.
I'm not sure how often this actually happens, but I have gotten a couple reports of fish "swimming off" then never coming back. Going through the fish AI (heh) with a fine tooth comb, I did find a couple possibilities and managed to reproduce one of them. Basically, when fish turn around, they didn't have any deceleration on their turn speed. It was possible that depending on your framerate, they could overshoot their goal angle, try again, overshoot it again, etc. I know this could happen for a long time if your framerate was low, though I've only ever seen it when running debug, personally (with a <10 framerate). I fixed this by having their turn speed decelerate when they got close to their goal angle.
I also found a situation where if their movement delta had a length of 0, a division I was doing could end up NaN (not a number), which would work its way into their origin, which would mean future updates would forever be invalid. This always resulted in the fish being teleported to the center of the screen though, so shouldn't be the same problem as them swimming off and vanishing.
Either way, I closed up a couple of holes here, we'll see if I get any more "my fish swam off and never came back" reports.
Synergy Free now supports all game modes & scoreboards
There hasn't been the demand I originally hoped for with this product, so I'm taking down all the limiters on the free version. The only difference between free and paid now is ads displayed on the title and game setup screens.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Silhouette v1.2
- Update: Faster portrait/landscape switching
- New Feature: Camera moves with home screen changes
This version inherits the quicker reloading from Galactic Core and Aquarium. The camera motion has a pref available in the paid version, allowing you to set the speed it transitions at (or off completely, if you prefer). This feature really didn't take too long in and of itself, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out how to find out which home screen the user was on -- then the other day I discovered onOffsetsChanged() staring me in the face, proving once and for all I'm terrible at reading documentation. It's a callback function within Engine that gives you all the data you need.
Either way, beyond that there was some general fixing as the scene didn't have things at the proper depth to make parallax make sense, but after a couple hours of adjusting models and scene layout it looks more or less the same, but now provides proper 3D parallax when the camera moves. Huzzah!
- New Feature: Camera moves with home screen changes
This version inherits the quicker reloading from Galactic Core and Aquarium. The camera motion has a pref available in the paid version, allowing you to set the speed it transitions at (or off completely, if you prefer). This feature really didn't take too long in and of itself, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out how to find out which home screen the user was on -- then the other day I discovered onOffsetsChanged() staring me in the face, proving once and for all I'm terrible at reading documentation. It's a callback function within Engine that gives you all the data you need.
Either way, beyond that there was some general fixing as the scene didn't have things at the proper depth to make parallax make sense, but after a couple hours of adjusting models and scene layout it looks more or less the same, but now provides proper 3D parallax when the camera moves. Huzzah!
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Galactic Core v1.36
- Update: Faster portrait/landscape switching
- Update: Landscape mode is zoomed further in
- New Feature: "Spin Speed" goes up to "very high" now
In testing a user's bug report, I discovered I was reloading textures when I didn't necessarily need to. This is slightly scary but I have it safety checked, and it worked fine through over a hundred portrait/landscape switches on a Motorola Droid -- and it's much, much faster when layout switching. This same change is working its way into my other wallpapers as well.
- Update: Landscape mode is zoomed further in
- New Feature: "Spin Speed" goes up to "very high" now
In testing a user's bug report, I discovered I was reloading textures when I didn't necessarily need to. This is slightly scary but I have it safety checked, and it worked fine through over a hundred portrait/landscape switches on a Motorola Droid -- and it's much, much faster when layout switching. This same change is working its way into my other wallpapers as well.
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