Building Jars

I'm finalizing the last of my needed preparations to have access to the SVN via Eclipse. Once that is finished, I'll look around in the subversion to see what needs jaring and eventually linking to the wiki.

It seems the instructions for setting up Eclipse for developers is outdated. Some of the targets in the file structure are no longer there and the build files don't properly run.

Wiki Revisions continued.

I don’t remember if you said whether or not you input my public key. Please remind/tell me if or when you did. Until then, I’ll keep scanning over the wiki.

Tutorials
• It probably is a little late to suggest or do this, but more tutorials would probably be useful. Potentially other tutorials featuring the different aspects of the JIG environment. For example, a tutorial to show how to add sound or make a scrolling screen game. Perhaps even to help people further understand how things are organized in JIG or how sprites are loaded.

Documentation
• Added a note to sprite sheets to warn users to beware of capitalization of file extensions can cause the sprite sheet to not load.
• Not certain if the Programmer Generated Graphics example works.
• Will need to test code on page later to make sure it works.
• Under Convex Polygons, it notes that people should do the SAT project. However I do not believe that is loaded onto the site or there is a link to it. I will probably need to do that later once I get my SVN working.

Sprite Repository
• Repository hasn’t been updated.
• Should consider uploading sprites from past projects if they are available.
• Sprite sheet details seem to lack information about smaller lasers in the Space Weapon Shot sprite sheet section. XML sheet does not reflect separate smaller lasers in the sprite sheet.
• All other sprite sheet details, images, and XML files seem to be correct and download correctly.

More Edits to the Wiki

Main Page
•Removed old news feeds

FAQ
•The data appears to be old. It might be outdated since the jig engine has been modified to not hog the processor
•Other recommendations might be useful (or just the complete removal from the page). Some suggestions I have include:
oHow do I remove objects from my Viewable Layers?
oHow do I use the Catto Physics Engine?
oMay I use the JIG Engine for personal projects?
•Corrected an existing spelling error on the page

Space Frenzy Tutorial
•Corrected spelling on several of the pages

More Edits and Notes on Wiki

Main Page
•Broken links in the news and for Andrew Nierman
•FAQ looks outdated and empty
•For some reason the changes in the JIG news page isn’t reflected on the main page (perhaps you could help me figure out why that is)

Design Considerations
•Contains notes from emails and other communications on what JIG should include. Consider for deletion unless you want a record of this.

Demos
•Image of the puzzle box is broken. The link can be cleaned out or if you have the picture, we can replace it.
•All demos download and run fine.

Navigation (I’m not sure if these can be changed or not)
•Current Events is an empty page, consider removing the page and link.
•Community Portal is an empty page, consider removing it.
•Help page is empty.

Front Page
•News finally updated itself

Wiki Reviewing

I’m starting to look at the Wiki to see if there are things that should be or need to be changed in case they don’t work or otherwise don’t fit on the website. I am going to start by looking at the main page to the website (http://ai.vancouver.wsu.edu/jig/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). I figure I’ll discuss with you what you want me to do about these recommended changes when we meet next. Until then I’m just going to note what seems off, doesn’t work, or might not be needed.

· I’m not sure if you want to bother with the RSS Feeds. Two of the feeds noted on the front page are empty (Changes to the Current Events Page and Recent Wiki Changes) and the third has an update from a half year ago.

· The development team is missing two of its most recent additions. Namely me and Stephen, I’m not sure if I should change that though.

· The links to the news articles about JIG from The News Tribune and the Columbian are broken links. The Next Generation link only directs the user to the home page of Edge Magazine now. The GameDaily link now links to some random discussion thread. All of these should be considered for removal unless you want to keep them there. I at least recommend removing the links.

· The publications page might want to be considered for removal or perhaps combined with the news section. There is only one publication and it is back in 2006.

· The link to Andrew Nierman leads to a broken page. Consider changing the link (I think this is his new website: http://babbage.ups.edu/~anierman/)

· When looking in the link leading to All Pages, there was a link to the 499 Class page. Unless you need it still, consider moving or removing it.

· The Wanted Pages link at the bottom of the page is empty; consider removing the link and page.

Game Demos Page

· Consider giving the demos an updated version of JIG. They all use as much CPU as possible without capping the frame rate.

The end

Ran into a weird error that prevented me from saving....yes, saving. For future reference...if you copy and paste the "π" character into Eclipse, it will not let you save until you remove it, even if it's in a comment.

Well, I encountered many bugs, most of them were null pointer exceptions. I fixed most of my problems by providing null checks at the beginning of functions such as directionAt. The first time directionAt is called, my grid has nothing in it.

Constantly throughout this assignment I found myself wanting a little more explanation about each method. The headers themselves provide information for what they do, but not why/when they're called. This got me into a lot of trouble because the methods are called at times I didn't expect, causing null pointer exceptions. Something simple like..."This method assumes a non-null node, if null then return null" or something to that nature.

On the second map, I ran into a bug. Anytime the ants move to the left, they spin. I'm not sure what's causing that but I don't think it's in my code. The ants don't seem affected though, they still travel in the correct direction, just spinning.

Aside from the bug described above, the project seems to be in perfect working order, I played with it for about an hour. Overall, Dijkstra's Algorithm is fairly straight forward once you convert it to "English", but converting it to code is the real challenge of this assignment. The open-endedness of being able to choose your own data structure is kind of cool, gives you a little satisfaction when you complete it that you made a choice and made it work. I found the given algorithm using u,v,w,Q,S was extremely turse and hard to read. The first thing I did was find a guide that expanded those into words I could get my brain around.

NEXT!

Debugging begins

I have completed the first draft of code and have turned to debugging. I fixed a few minor array bounds errors but I kept getting a persistent error when I tried used destinations.get(0);

I found that destinations.isEmpty() returns true and I'm not sure if I am able to continue if I don't have a destination available.