Monday, December 31, 2012

ArtClient v2.7 beta

Just in time for any New Year's Eve Artemis parties, I'm releasing version 2.7 beta of my unofficial Android client for Artemis SBS.

You can download it here(See update below) and check out the changes below.

Changes:


  • NEW: Helm (finally) will use the correct drive (warp/jump) when joining in-progress games!
  • NEW: Station shields shown when selected by science/captain
  • FIX: Red alert/Shields status are shown/updated correctly when joining an in-progress game
  • FIX: Captain's map selector behaves and looks more like the official one
  • FIX: Bearing indicator should never go negative anymore
  • Turning smoothing should be better now, as we use the server-indicated turn rate if possible
  • Engineering sliders follow updates from the server during a game, now. May not be important, but the official client does this
  • Minor tweaks to improve Radar rendering, ship selection, etc.
UPDATE: In response to the request for access to this again, I'm adding the improved, 2.7.2 beta that was posted on the Artemis forums. You can download it here and see the added tweaks below:
  • 2.7.1: 30000% sliders bug fixed 
  • 2.7.2: Add version check so it doesn't try to play with incompatible servers (causing, you know, crashes)

Thursday, December 27, 2012

ArtClient v2.6 beta

Just released version 2.6 beta of my unofficial Android client for Artemis SBS. Since I forgot to post about 2.5 beta, I'll include its changes in the list here, too.

You can download version 2.6 beta here.

Changes:


  • NEW: Helm and Weapons can see distance and bearing to nearby ships
  • NEW: Heading indicator for Helm, about the steering slider
  • NEW: Preference for tilt steering sensitivity, and to choose an alternative axis (for people whose devices report the wrong one, I guess)
  • NEW: Neutral and enemy ships should get some smoothing to their turning.
  • NEW: Receive and play back incoming audio messages (incoming_message scripting command)
  • FIX: More ships on radar (I was treating the INVIS_TO_* flags as always active, but science was showing some INVIS_TO_SCIENCE ships if the "state" bitmask was empty, so I guess they all need to be "active" or something)
  • FIX: Further reduce (remove?) "pop" when loading and unloading tubes
  • FIX: Changing beam frequencies works properly (IE: Doesn't unload torpedo tubes... oops!)
  • FIX: Handle missing .snt files more gracefully (for Mods support)
  • FIX: Remove "tilt" menu item from weapons
  • Further improved neutral ship parsing

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

ArtClient v2.4 beta

Recently released version 2.4 beta of my unofficial Android client for Artemis SBS. It adds some fun new features, and fixes a bunch of little issues!

You can download it here, or check out the changelog:

  • NEW: Tilt-to-steer feature for Helm, if your device has an accelerometer and magnetic field sensor
  • NEW: Tap-to-steer feature, just like the official client!
  • NEW: Captain's map! Basically Science without scanning, but had a lot of requests
  • FIXED: Inability to select the station you just were after changing ships
  • FIXED: Font colors in jump dialog were wrong
  • Padding/sizes in Jump Dialog tweaked to hopefully fit smaller screens better
  • Improved parsing of neutral and enemy ship packets

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Artemis SBS on Android (Unofficial)

Don't know if you've heard of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, but it's pretty much the best game ever. If you like spaceships or cooperative games at all, you will be as hooked as I am!

A while ago, I decided that it would be pretty excellent to play this game on a tablet, and having a Nexus 7 and being an Android developer, I set out to do something about it. There's now an official iOS version available, but at the time I started, that hadn't even been announced.

And, I'm an Android guy.

So, I sat down with Wireshark and observed the packets that the official PC client sent and figured out the structure, then began the laborious process of building a packet parser in Java and continued figuring out the packets.

A couple months later, I now have an almost fully-functioning Android client, and wanted to share it here. To be clear, this is a completely unofficial and unsupported version, whose functionality is entirely based on me guessing at the packet structures. They seem to be mostly close enough, but I haven't had any input from the creator of Artemis about the correct structure, so weird things may happen!

You can track the progress of the app from its thread on the Artemis forums, or just check out the latest version here: ArtClient Version 2.3 beta

Follow the break for some screenshots.


Wednesday, June 13, 2012

WeGoIgo 2.2 -- with Lite version!

Just a quick post to say that I've released version 2.2 of my Go app just now. Along with a handful of features and changes, this version fixes a slew of bugs and stability issues. Thanks to everyone for reporting the bugs! I'm very happy with this new release—so happy that I've finally gotten around to releasing the Lite version. As before, the Lite version has all the same great features of the paid version, but shows somes ads in a (I hope) non-intrusive manner, and is a lower priority for releases (as is apparent by the several weeks between 2.0 going live on the normal version and this release).

Follow the break for the official changelog.

UPDATE: There were two issues with this update that have since been resolved. The first was with the Lite version. Apparently I accidentally imported the "internal" version of the ObjectAnimator class from ActionBarSherlock instead of the nineoldandroids version, which caused an immediate FC in any game mode for devices with an older version of Android. Sorry!

The other was an issue where files would appear to hang while loading. It was missed by me because I forgot that I had the "don't keep activities" developer setting enabled, which hid the problem. Sorry again!

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

WeGoIgo 2.0 Released!

The new home screen
It is with great pleasure that I finally announce the release of WeGoIgo 2.0! There are still a few things that I plan to add, but I decided that if I kept stalling to add new features, it would never get out the door. I've spent the last couple of weeks testing it, tweaking it, and making last minute changes in an effort to make this release the best Go app on the market.

To anyone who has upgraded to the new version, please feel free to send me feedback-- especially if something doesn't work, or breaks! I did my best to test everything, but the app has many parts-- a lot of which are new or drastically updated in this release-- so it is very possible that I've missed something.

If version 2.0 is news to you, check out my announcement blog post for more details on what has changed. Please be aware that I have increased the price to $2.49. This is still cheaper than almost every other Go app on the market, and I feel the many, many hours I've put into the app deserve the extra change. If you don't agree, then feel free to wait until I update the lite version with the new features :)

That's it for now. I hope you enjoy the new version as much as I do!

Friday, April 20, 2012

Coming soon: WeGoIgo 2.0

Today I've uploaded GnuGo for WeGoIgo version 1.2 onto the market, in anticipation of the release of WeGoIgo 2.0.

Version 2.0 of my Go application for Android represents a huge step forward for the app---and, I think, for Go on Android in general. For this release, I've gutted the original app, taking everything I've learned since I first wrote WeGoIgo and improving it in nearly every way. While reading SGF files may be a bit slower, it is actually way more efficient---using a custom-built database to store large files for quick retrieval with minimal overhead---and way more flexible, and using the official SGF checker code as a base for more "correct" and compatible SGF loading.

In addition to this, I have finally added annotation features---a first, I think, on Android. You will now be able to edit comments, add labels and symbols, and place stones. Furthermore, once you've added comments and annotations to a game, perhaps you want to email it to someone---no sweat! With WeGoIgo 2.0, sharing games your playing or reviewing is just a click away!

Version 2.0 will be coming out very soon! I don't have anything else on my To-do list at the moment and am in the process of testing, trying to iron out any last-minute bugs.

Follow the break for screenshots and a more comprehensive list of updates, changes, and new features. There are a lot!

Saturday, March 24, 2012

DropSpot 1.2

I never got around to posting about the initial release of DropSpot, so I guess I'll just do that now.

If you don't know, DropSpot is an Android app I released recently to easily access and manipulate files on your Android device wirelessly, over wifi, using a modern web browser such as Google Chrome. The key feature of the app, and the reason I created it, is that you can drag-and-drop files from your native file explorer right onto the browser, and have it copy the files to your phone---you can even copy multiple files at once!

I'm posting today because I've released version 1.2 of the app onto the Market (Google Play). This is a relatively small update, but with some (I hope) welcome improvements. First, you can now download entire folders as a zip file. I know I was sometimes frustrated at only being able to download files one-at-a-time, so this should be very useful. Selecting individual files in a folder to download is a feature that I will definitely include at some point, but is not a part of this release.

Next, many users requested that they be able to access their removable SD cards and such. After some research, it seems that many device manufacturers have been including extra SD card slots in their devices---particularly tablets. This is troublesome, because even the most recent versions of the Android API only tell you where the "default" external storage is. Previously, DropSpot hid the internal stuff from you, and only showed you that "default" external drive. This was for convenience and simplicity, since most people don't care about the internals of their device. However, to access some of these alternative external drives, it was important to have that ability.

My compromise is that, by default, folders which cannot be read AND written to are hidden, and when you first open the web interface, it defaults to that "default" external drive. Please see the wiki for more details on finding your external drives.

Last, a handful of crashes reported have been fixed, as well as some web interface bugs. In particular, if your browser does not support the way DropSpot does uploads, it will properly let you know.

Links:
DropSpot Wiki
- DropSpot Google Play Listing ($1.99)
- DropSpot Lite Google Play Listing (Free)

Friday, January 27, 2012

Getting Git-y

Now that BitBucket does free, private Git repositories, I've new going a little crazy adding a bunch of my projects, old and new, to Git repos and pushing them into the cloud for safe keeping.

In the process, I've decided to share some projects publicly on Github, as well. So far I've put up my Software Engineering project from last semester, and the experimental CMS that I wrote in AppEngine Python for my Orchestra's website. I'll probably post the Java Applet that goes with that CMS for publishing the website over SFTP sometime later.

It's nice to see my Github profile looking not quite so forlorn :)