Sea Turtle!

Issues of scale aside, people really want a sea turtle... so here we go.  I'm starting with an existing model and reducing the polygon count down to budget, but he's looking pretty good so far.  This is based on an original model by Ajunip.  He'll probably have 200-300 triangles trimmed by the time I'm done, then it's on to animation.

City at Night v1.07

 - Update: More blinking lights

Sounds silly, I guess, but there's several more animated lights in the new version.  It's small, but a little more motion is always a plus, and I wanted to get a couple framework updates integrated without doing one of those completely invisible what-did-I-get-out-of-this style updates.  Enjoy!

Generala v1.57

 - Bug Fix: White text on Droid X
 - Update: SD card storage support

I think one or two other things might've snuck in there too, it's been a while since Generala got an update.  Of the above items, the interesting one is the Droid X bug.  Let's discuss that.

Basically, what I was doing to control the color of the score text was to use a 'style'.  These are defined in an xml file and work basically like a CSS style, in the sense that you bundle up a font, font size, font color, and a number of other things all into a single object -- say, one called "BlackScriptBold".  Then, when you define your text fields, you simply hook that field up to BlackScriptBold to give it all those properties.

In general,  this is good practice, because that way if you need to do something like change the font, you only change the one style entry and everything using that style automatically uses that new setting.  Otherwise, you'd have to visit every place where you were using your script font and change them all individually, which in a decent size project could be dozens or hundreds of locations.  Obviously, there's a lot more margin for error when making a hundred scattered changes.  Thus, good practice.

So, this is what I was doing for the score boxes in Generala.  I got a bug report a week or two ago saying the scores showed up in white on the Droid X, which was nearly impossible to read against the paper-grain background.  I double checked that everything still looked right, which considering it works everywhere else I was pretty sure of, and ultimately ended up forcibly setting the color to black for each individual score box instead of in the style.  This fixed the issue.

The moral of this story is that if you're having weird issues with Android UI display on a Droid X, it's possible Motorola has munged up their handling of styles somehow.  Between this and the live wallpaper filtering bug (which I hope and pray gets fixed with the Droid's 2.2 update) Motorola's been a bit iffy with their handling of standard functionality so far...

Silhouette v1.45

 - New Feature: Camera zoom pref
 - Update: Greater range of camera motion
 - Update: SD card storage support

The primary work feature here is wider camera motion, which required rework of some of the background graphics, as, frankly, they didn't go all that far before.  Widening the landscape and sky models allowed for more horizontal camera travel in both landscape and portrait mode, which definitely helps the feel in this brave new world of 5 and 7 home-screen phones.

Along those same lines, I've had a couple folks request the ability to reduce the amount of black at the bottom of the screen.  After trying a couple approaches, I settled on one that moves the camera up and bit and zooms in its' field of view by about 20 degrees.  This frames the scene a bit differently and works very well, I think, while reducing the amount of dead space at the bottom of the composition.

Aquarium v1.8

 - New Fish: Clown Triggerfish
 - Update: Better overhead light
 - Update: Closer bounds on fish movement
 - Update: Mipmapping off by default
 - Update: Fish take an interest more often

Big credit goes to cliff1066™ for his (Creative Commons Attribution licensed) clown triggerfish image, which worked quite well as source material.  Check out his photostream for a bunch of cool stuff!

Closer bounds on fish movement is probably the most mysterious thing here.  Basically, the fish periodically select a destination to swim to, and upon approaching that destination slow down, begin turning, and select a new destination.  As they travel they'll occasionally re-evaluate and change to a new destination.  The destination position itself is randomly selected within a range of X and Y, roughly encompassing the background area.

As I've noticed occasional comments about fish leaving and not coming back (which is impossible given the way the system works, they simply cannot try to go anywhere outside the specified X and Y bounds), I'm guessing this just means the fact that they'll sometimes leave the visible area before turning and swimming back.  To that end I pulled in the left and right edges of their range by about 10%, so they shouldn't leave the edge of the visible area as much.

North American Flags v1.0

Been working on this one the last couple weeks, and it's finally just about set.  This is an animated wallpaper showing a hanging flag blowing in the wind, with a bunch of customization options.  It includes flags of the United States, Canada, and all 50 US states.  There's seven backgrounds -- Five of places in North America, plus black and white.  You can select the state of the flag (solid pristine, translucent, or solid tattered) and the animation speed.  In landscape mode you get a more stylized angled close-up of the flag.  It's quite pretty!

Check out the YouTube video!  The wallpaper itself will go live tomorrow morning, and we're really excited about this one, the motion turned out really great and it's fun to watch!