#waydroid

Ubuntu Touch, el sistema operativo móvil impulsado por la comunidad y mantenido por la Fundación UBports, acaba de lanzar su actualización OTA-9. Esta nueva versión se asienta sobre la base de la edición Focal de Ubuntu 20.04 LTS e integra varias mejoras importantes, entre las que destacan un mejor soporte para VoLTE, una actualización de Waydroid y un cambio en la fuente de emoji predeterminada…

Things have gotten complicated. I have enough of a game there to stop faffing about with adding elements higgledy-piggledy to a test level and actually start doing some level design. I want to get this game in front of test players as soon as I can so I can get feedback on, you know, if it's any good, how I can make it better, and so forth; and for that I need real levels even if they're in an early, rough form. The problem I'm confronting now is just how much I suck at level design.

Part of the problem is, that lovely JSON format I devised for level layout makes it difficult to visualize a level. So that brings me to the first new dev tool I'm using.

NA-Builder

NA-Builder is an ongoing effort for a level viewer/editor for NullAwesome. It is written largely in Gambit Scheme, with some bits in C; and structured so that I can start with the simplest bit, a JSON parser, and gradually add components on top of that until I have a full-fledged graphical editor.

But alas, I'm nowhere near building the editor. So instead, I settled for an image generator that uses the JSON parser to read a level file and spits out a map of the level in XPM format. Then I have some Emacs Lisp which allows me to send the current buffer to the map generator and opens the resulting image in a separate buffer -- so at the stroke of a key, I can view the results right within Emacs. This considerably quickens the feedback loop when I'm editing a level by tweaking the JSON directly. It works well enough for now.

NA-Builder is not yet ready for wide release. Maybe someday.

Waydroid

The other dev tool I've been making use of is not of my own authorship, but I got it working well enough for normal use.

See, the problem is, the Android emulators that ship with Android Studio suck. I have added keyboard support to the game so that it is easily playable on PCs, Chromebooks, and other devices. But the Android Studio emulator's keyboard support is... spotty. When you hold down a key, it appears to send key-press/key-release events to the app very rapidly, resulting in herky-jerky character movements and an inability to jump with any precision. But when I tried a commercial PC Android emulator like BlueStacks, everything was hunky-dory.