[bpj1138]

Greetings!

Just in time for the US open tennis tournament, I've uploaded "Flipper Ball", a sort of a hybrid of pong and tennis, maybe more like pinball? The reason I wrote this while developing Weekend Racer was to test the waters of fixed point physics, which I'm happy to say seem to work, at least for this simple game, however, I did find out there are problems with it. The system seems to work only if the world is rather huge, close to the limits of ints, any smaller, the errors get big, any larger and there are overflows (I'm talking about a few bits of difference here, just enough to get the job done for this tiny playfield). So, I'd have to say making a larger field in fixed point would be damned nearly impossible, so I'm probably not going to convert Weekend Racer to fixed point. In any case, I'm gonna need to test this before I set it loose on the public, so you guys get the first swing at it (pun intended). Let me know what phone you tested on, what the framerate was like, was there jitter in the framerate? The graphics engine is based on a previous game that's been tested, so hopefully there won't be any problems. Naturally, it's been tested on WTK23. Thanks in advance for your ongoing help.

As usual, two mirrors (probably won't need it, but just in case)..

http://www.geocities.com/bpj1138/FlipperBallBin.zip
http://www.geocities.com/bjaszcz/FlipperBallBin.zip

--Bart

[peterblazejewicz]

hi Bart,

Nokia 6680 latest firmware
- I've got major issue: game doesn't close (either via "Close" or "Exit" added by system) and needs to be canceled via application manager or via device reboot, that's happening on game screen so you should check that part,
- moving flip from side to side is a bit slow I think
- I played flippers when was youngster - when I press flip it wont fire until released - consider that :D

regards,
Peter

[bpj1138]

I'll definitely check into the exit bug, thanks for the info. I guess the game behaves more like tennis than pinball. In pinball the flipper velocity has only two states (zero and full speed). I wanted to get a more varied motion, so there would be differences in the impact velocity, so the motion is sine-based. I also tried to make the user press and hold a button which would wind up the shot, then release it to fire, but I thought this took too much time to execute. So, that's how I ended up with what's there.

--Bart

[bpj1138]

Peter,

I uploaded a new version with the exit command completely reworked. I added exit commands to all forms, so hopefully the OS won't need to add them. Also changed a couple of other things that were bothering me. Hopefully these changes corrected the problem. I hope you can help me out and do another test, dziekuje bardzo.

--Bart

PS: What's with the OS pausing my thread when I switch to a form? Is this intended? I don't know why this got passed me before, other than that's what I wanted it to do, but it's sort of strange behavior. I added redundant pause signals just so it works that way on all implementations.

[peterblazejewicz]

hi Bart,

its working now - I mean - game can be exited on my 6680 (however you are simply quit from entire application instead of quitting current game),
Flip move could be more responsive - i've a filling that i'm movign something really heavy on screen (move interval is to small compared to screen area I think),
not sure what do you mean by os pausing my thread?
you have showNotify()/hideNotify() on canvas cubclasses or isShown() for Displayable subclasses and pauseApp()/startApp() of MIDlet subclasses,
take as example Nokia sample game sheepdog which ships with S40/s60 sdks in sample app folder:

public void startApp()
    {
        Displayable current = Display.getDisplay(this).getCurrent();
        if (current == null)
        {
            // first time we've been called
            Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(new SplashScreen(this));
        }
        else
        {
            if (current == sheepdogCanvas)
            {
                sheepdogCanvas.start();   // start its animation thread
            }
            Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(current);
        }
    }


    public void pauseApp()
    {
        Displayable current = Display.getDisplay(this).getCurrent();
        if (current == sheepdogCanvas)
        {
            sheepdogCanvas.stop();   // kill its animation thread
        }
    }

hth,
regards,
Peter

[bpj1138]

Good, at least you don't have to kill it forcibly! No, I don't think that's what I was talking about. In my midlet, I simply run a thread, which runs in the background, but only if a canvas object is shown, but when I switch to the help form object, the thread in the midlet stops without any intervention on my part, when I switch back from the help form to the canvas object, the midlet thread resumes.

--Bart