Networking Done

The UDP networking is now done for my Freevo remote app, tested it with my Freevo server earlier and it works perfectly. Just have to finish up the Settings tab, which will most likely be done today, so that one can specify what host and port it should connect to and stuff like that. Then it’s just the final icons and intensive bug testing and tweaking left to do. Making this app has been a great help in putting the stuff I have learned in the book into practice.
So school starts again tomorrow. Or well not really. I’m just going to talk to someone about what courses I decided on for my master’s education (since you get to pick 90% of the curriculum yourself). The courses don’t actually start until Tuesday. Will be nice to start meeting other people again, rather than sitting here cooped up in Karlskrona with nobody we know.

Art update

So I found some artists to help me out with my apps. Andreas Nilsson is making some icons for the Freevo remote app. Rasmus Welin is learning how to make sprite characters for the usage in the JRPG I mentioned previously. So now I just have to get out of procrastination mode and continue work on the apps.

Starting the Masters education on Monday at BTH, so I don't know how much time there will be for programming on these things during the week, but there's always the weekends.

The Battle Plan

So I have decided what my big iPhone game down the road will be. It will be a jrpg styled game, like all the “Tales of” games.

This decision came after buying a game, which is similar in concept, from the app store. People were raving about how perfect and wonderful this game was etc etc.

It didn’t take long to realize that people have really low standards to when it comes to games on the iPhone. Sure it isn’t a super powerful platform for games in the first place, but the products should still be held at a high standard. It lacked lots of sound effects, dialogs made no sense, made lots of contemporary comments which ruined the atmosphere (gangster rap in a medieval fantasy setting doesn’t make sense now does it?), worthless controls, annoying background music. The list just goes on and on and still almost all of those which have commented on this game gave the score 5/5.

So that was when I decided that a jrpg is what I would, to show people how a proper game should be like on the iPhone. This will probably be years in the making, but I have time.

iPhone ahoy!

Yeah. So I finally started reading the iPhone book the other day. So far I have learned a whole bunch of cool stuff when it comes to making graphical interfaces and I must say that it was easier and more streamlined than I thought it would be.
So soon maybe I am qualified to make my first in-game menu for a game ;)
Check back soon for more about my progress, if it pleases you!

Update of small importance.

So I haven’t posted anything in a while. Mainly because nothing much programming related has happened.
I moved in with my girlfriend to our new apartment in Karlskrona, KNA, last weekend and since then we have generally been busy with getting the place in order and exploring KNA.
I did however finish one more assignment in the “Multimedia programming with Python”. Which sounds much more fun than it actually is. The course recommends the usage of Tkinter, which I find to be extremely boring and feels very old and poorly designed. Not to mention some problems it seems to have with Python’s garbage collector.
With the assignment I submitted yesterday I chose to declare a function that would load some images and display them on the screen, but for some unexplainable reason the images just wouldn’t show on the screen although the window would get the correct size to fit every image.
So after an hour of two of debugging and googling I found the problem with the following snippet of code:

image = Image.open("python.jpg")
tkpicture = ImageTk.PhotoImage(image)
label_image = Label(self.parent, image=tkpicture)

This code is completely appropriate and loads an image from file and works in all cases, except when it is used within a function.
Apparently the line Label(self.parent, image=tkpicture) does not trigger python to increment the reference count of tkpicture. So when one returns from the loadImage() function the garbage collector thinks tkpicture is unused and therefore deletes it.
The “solution” to this problem is to do the following:

label_image = Label(self.parent, image=tkpicture)
label_image.image = tkpicture

This seems infinitely inane since assigning tkpicture to image is what the Label constructor is doing already. I highly doubt that there isn’t a better way of doing this. Not to mention that doing this prevents Python from cleaning up tkpicture by itself. So one have to make sure to do this:

label_image.image = o

Otherwise one would be leaking memory due to that extra reference.
Just one final assignment to be done and then I am done with this course, and a happy day it will be.

Going to start reading the iPhone book soon. That I can guarantee will be a much more pleasant experience.