• Update the ADT plugin in Eclipse (Help -> Check for Updates)
• Open the Android SDK Manager, either from within Eclipse, or from your Android SDK folder
• Fetch all the updates
• Fetch all the updates again
• Fetch the updates one more time…

The end result should be an updated ADT plugin, as well as up to date SDK packages. Make sure you have all three of the ones in the following image, with the exact version numbers.

Happy coding

Two issues this release fixes are a fix for OpenAL stereo source playback and compatibility with Java 7 on Mac OS X.

Please give it a spin and report any issues you have, Nate and I are already testing it out on all three desktop OSs.

Thanks go to team LWJGL!

I participated in Ludum Dare 26, theme “minimalism”. Below is my battle report.

I decided on a dialog based text adventure. Using libgdx, i quickly threw together the dialog engine, all in all a whooping 300 loc, including json parsing, same fancy pants interlaced shader, and a morse code renderer and audio player. All in all i spent about 1.5h on coding. I’ll put up the source tomorrow, to tired to write a proper .gitignore.

Once that was done, i had to come up with a story and characters. Behold my design tools:

Two things became immediately clear: it’s extremely hard to come up with a compelling “story”, and it’s even harder to put all that into a concise format. One of the two characters talks in morse code, so any utterances had to be extremely short. This limitation, nay, minimalism was rather hard to deal with.

In the end, i spent a good 5.5h working on the dialog. Lessons learned: text-adventures (in spite of a better genre name for …—…) are harder to make than platform games with crazy mechanics, and i’ll never be a writer. Also, there don’t seem to be any good dialog editing tools. The closest i got was some random mind mapping software, but even that was more cumbersome than pen & paper.

I’m happy with the end result. Go give it a try. You can enjoy it on your desktop (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), provided you have Java installed, or in your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), provided WebGL is supported. All through the glorious power of libgdx!

There is a new class called JsonValue. It is a single container that represents a JSON object, array, string, double, long, boolean, or null. You might think it strange that double and long are in the list since all numbers in JSON are floats, but these data types allow us to use JSON for object serialization without losing data. Anyway, JsonValue provides methods to get the value out as a specific type, pretty printing, and iteration. No more casting, pointy brackets, and verbose map iteration. Children are a doubly linked list and iterated this way:

JsonValue map = ...;
for (JsonValue entry = map.child(); entry != null; entry = entry.next())
    System.out.println(entry.name() + " = " + entry.asString());

Arrays and objects are treated the same, they both simply have children. The children values of an object can use name() to get the object key.

Convenience methods are provided to get the value or children of a child. Eg, getString(“name”) returns the value of the key “name” as a string. If not found, it throws an exception. With getString(“name”, “defaultValue”), the second parameter is returned if not found, instead of throwing an exception. The get(“name”) method returns a child as a JsonValue, or null if not found. require(“name”) does the same but throws an exception if not found. These methods remove the need for null checking while still allowing you to write code that fails properly for unexpected input.

So what does this mean for your code that uses libgdx’s JSON classes? Only reading JSON is affected. If you use JsonReader, you’ll get back a JsonValue instead of an OrderedMap. If you use the Json class for object serialization, you won’t be affected unless you were parsing into OrderedMaps. The Json.Serializer and Json.Serializable have changed slightly. My apologies if you have to make changes! The JsonValue class is fully documented and hopefully any changes you have to make are minor. GWT emulation has been updated. If you encounter bugs, please file an issue on the tracker and it will be fixed post-haste!

The libgdx JSON stuff is also available as JsonBeans for use outside of libgdx. The next thing I’ll do is allow KryoNet to use it for a human readable serialization format.

-Nate

Now back to your normal program.

So, a few days ago i found Kilobolt’s “Android Game Development Tutorial”. The tutorial is currently the #1 search result on Google for the terms “android game development tutorial”.

Obviously, the code on that page is my book’s code. While the author states that he improve the framework, all he really did was fuck up the formatting, and add modifications that will ensure that the game will run horribly on any mid-level device. The tutorials explain nothing, hand waving via phrases like “you don’t have to understand this”.

That’s fine. The code is Apache 2, so legally all is well. If people want to learn from such a poor resource as this tutorial, that’s cool with me as well. If you want the real deal, click on the book image in the top right corner of this page. Or find a backup copy on the internet. The code is here.

What’s a bit funky is that the tutorial pages are full of ads. They are everywhere. Fair game, the code is Apache 2, but it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

Here’s what’s not fine. I wrote a friendly comment on one of the tutorial pages. That was deleted/not approved. After that, the author appearantly shit his pants a little and added the paragraph about the code being based on my book. Without linking to my book. I tried to contact the author via e-mail, twice, but never got a reply.

Now, just to make sure i get my message across properly: i love when people use my stuff to create awesome things, be they commercial or non-commercial. I have no problem with not getting a “cut”. I do have a problem with leeches like Kilobolt, that take the hard work of others, sell it as their own, not even giving a single bit of credit where its due, and monetizing it heavily. I also have a problem with poor tutorials, that explain nothing, give terrible advice in form of horrible code, while making the reader think they are learning something worth while.

It kinda sucks that things like this happen. Again, form a legal perspective it’s fair game, and i do not complain that someone’s using OSS code for commercial endevours. However, the way Kilobolt is doing this (no credit, then a little credit, no replies to e-mails, censoring of posts) is disgusting. The book was one of the few ways i try to make a bit of money from libgdx and all the other gaming related things i put out there for free. Seeing it being ripped off like this doesn’t evoke the greatest feelings.

Here’s a link to the “Android Game Development Workshop” i gave a while ago. It contains extensive slides explaining everything, and comes with full source-code. Do yourself a favor and use that as a resource, instead of this horrible money grab by Kilobolt.

gsocbot
21:28 carols: Next in line is badlogic1 with notice 'libgdx https://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCode2013'
21:28 mode (+v badlogic1) by scorche|sh
21:28 mode (-v Talad) by scorche
badlogic1
21:28 hi carols! scorche: please also +v bach and Xoppa as well
carols
21:28 libgdx
21:28 hello 
21:28 mode (+vvv badlogic1 bach Xoppa) by scorche|sh
21:28 samxan_ [~sam@kde/developer/bairagya] entered the room.
bach
21:28 hi carols 
Xoppa
21:28 hi carols
carols
21:28 ah, right.
21:29 hi 
21:29 so a few things
21:29 firstly, your summaries on your ideas could use a little more information.
21:29 some of them are a bit sparse
21:29 but also, did i mention we got a lot of applications for games this year?
badlogic1
21:29 understood, we tried to provide links to further discussion, but i guess more meat on the page itself doesn't hurt
21:29 kiuz left the room (quit: Ping timeout: 255 seconds).
carols
21:29 and game frameworks and video engines and and and...
badlogic1
21:29 yes 
21:30 samxan left the room (quit: Ping timeout: 276 seconds).
21:30 zamn left the room (quit: Quit: leaving).
carols
21:30 yeah, a little more meat would have been good here.
badlogic1
21:30 we'll try to sabotage ogre and wesnoth next year (and bribe you with chocolate)
21:30 jk_ left the room (quit: Ping timeout: 245 seconds).
badlogic1
21:30 apart from that, is the idea list page ok structuracll?
21:30 *structurally
carols
21:30 aw, but i am unbribeable 
21:30 private [~private@93-81-181-180.broadband.corbina.ru] entered the room.
21:30 LigH left the room.
carols
21:30 yes, structurally i think it looks great.
21:31 oh also
21:31 tyage [~tyage@KD111108227088.ppp-bb.dion.ne.jp] entered the room.
carols
21:31 did you possibly talk to catroid about them being an umbrella for you too?
21:31 i don't know if you work together or not.
badlogic1
21:31 not yet, but i'll talk to them sometime next week (i work at the campus)
carols
21:32 ok, great.
badlogic1
21:32 last question: anything we need to improve in our application form?
carols
21:32 application looks good.
21:32 quite extensive answers.
badlogic1
21:32 can trim those down
21:32 i understand you have a "few" more projects to judge 
carols
21:32 eh, i like it that way 
badlogic1
21:32 oki
carols
21:32 i like the fact that you've thought extensively about it.
badlogic1
21:32 goody, i think that's it from our end, others are still waiting
carols
21:33 anyway, i'd have liked that much meat on your ideas page.
21:33 great, thanks 
21:33 thanks for waiting
21:33 have a nice weekend
Xoppa
21:33 thanks
carols
21:33 cheers.
badlogic1
21:33 you too ciao!

We’ll try to put more meat behind our idea list next year and try again!

In other news: I’m still overwhelmed with day job stuff. Xoppa, Nate and all the other folks keep things running. I’ll be back in May, with a bit of a surprise (no code, just an interesting thingamatsching).

We’ll get feedback from Google on the 19th on IRC, until then we can only guess as to why we were rejected. We’ll try to apply again next year