Archive for September 15, 2011

Using Partial WakeLock in libGDX

A reader asking how they could keep sound running in a libGDX Android project when the screen turns off. I don’t use libGDX in Pocket Fan, but I do use a Wake Lock to keep the sound running while the screen is off, so maybe we can do something similar with libGDX. Read more

Unexpected Uses for Pocket Fan

I envisioned Pocket Fan to be a novelty app. What else would you call an app that displayed an animated fan? It certainly wasn’t supposed to be useful. My perception changed when I got this comment on the Android Market:

Can’t sleep without the sound of a fan. This is almost perfect for power outages. Just needs to stay open and not black screen after 1 minute.

When I first read that comment, I thought to myself “He can just set his screen to never time out…” and went back to work on my game. Then I saw a post on reddit entitled “I can’t sleep unless you’re near me…”. It was just a picture of a box fan, but it all clicked for me then. Pocket Fan could be used as a sound machine or noise generator.  Read more

Catching libgdx Exceptions in Eclipse

For those of you that actually know what you’re doing in Eclipse, you can skip this post. For the rest of us, I wanted to share a quick tip for debugging libgdx in Eclipse.

Make sure to set the debugger to break on GdxRuntimeException or any other libgdx exceptions you want to inspect. This Stack Overflow post shows how.

If you don’t set the debugger to catch these exceptions, you’ll likely find that it breaks execution in the OpenGL thread, which is generally not very helpful, because the code that threw the original exception is in your game thread.

Gesture-Based Reloading Coming Soon

I’m about to add gesture-based reloading to Silver Dollar Shooter. I’m almost done tweaking some parameters and so far, it’s really fun. The update will come in the next few days.

Things I am Doing When I Enter the Wrong Passcode

My phone and tablet can take pictures with the front-facing camera when somebody enters the wrong passcode. It’s meant to snap a picture of the person who stole your phone or somebody snooping around your gadgets. However, it also captures the moments when I am not paying attention to what I’m doing.

I think the funniest part is that I’m looking directly at the device for most of these pictures. I just suck at entering my passcode.