It is not based on the official API yet as there are still a few things missing there. This means, it could break if somethign changes on server side, but I only experienced this twice in the last six months. So it _should_ be fine :-)
That's amazing - I'm wondering why there are so few responses yet. I installed your app and it works smoothly on my old Android phone with very low memory even. Zooming the starmap works too.
I'm not able to switch to a planet or a ship view though. Maybe I'm just missing how to do that?
@kwesy: well, the Desire S (currently I still can count downloads in single digits, so I think this is your Download :-)) isn't that old, it would be strange if it wouldn't work there.
the Code isn't open at the moment. I'm not a software developer for >5 years now and my coding skills have somewhat degraded...and as this was my first large Android project, the code contains kind of weird things. I'm currently refactoring it to be more mantainable and then we'll see.
@rudel: Do you happen to know which Android version you are running exactly? You can check from the home screen/menu button/settings and the something like "telephone info)"(last entry in the list) and then either Android version in this list or click on software info there.
I made a mistake in the Manifest file and only enabled devices with at least 2.3. I already changed this to >2.1, but still have to upload an update. The only other requirement is a touchscreen. I am running it on my Nook Color (which is way better than on the small phone screen) with CM7 fine here. I think I will be able to upload a new version latest late next week, though I hope earlier.
I installed it on the Galaxy II phone... what should I be able to do with this at this stage?
Issues I've seen, and assuming probably not implemented yet?
1. Click on Ship or Planet takes to star map but doesn't put circle around the desired object. 2. Not sure how to get to ship or planet screens 3. How do you move a ship?
That's pretty much as far as I could get so far... pretty neat though if you can get all the functionality to work I'd say.
The Galaxy Tab is really only version 2.2. As I wrtoe, with the next version it will be running there too.
Regarding the Planet/Ship details, this screen is not there (yet). Actually it is, but I disabled it for now as I don't know yet how to put all the information on one screen. Think I have a way, but I still have to really make it usefull. I hope I can deliver one soon...but not with the version next week.
@capnkill: That's the reason why you can't get a detail screen yet.
There is no circle on the star map if you click on a ship or planet as this element is always exactly in the center of the screen. I thought about adding some kind of animation or marker, but didn't see sense in just showing it in the middle all the time. But I think I should reactivate it again :-)
About moving ships, as I wrote, right now the client is read only (for various reasons). Also I tried adding ship movement, but this is on a normal phone screen just not really usable. If anyone has a good idea, I'd be happy to hear it. Right now, positioning a waypoint on a touchscreen isn't funny.
Currently I think before enabling ship movement I will add messaging and some tools that also write data.
But as I wrote, almost everything is open for discussion :-)
I think it would be VERY useful to mark whatever item we click on when we get to the star map, even if it is centered, it is still hard to tell, especially if you are in a cluster of planets or what not.
Once you enable the ship screen I can play around wit hit and see what the best way to do ship movement would be.
I think your goal should be to give the mobile up 100% full functionality, so that someone can do their entire turn from it... or else, there isn't much point I would say.
Ship movement would be simple I'd think... you click on the ship as we normaly do, then you can tap to where you want the ship to fly. Perhaps a double tap can open up a coordinate window if you want to do specific deep space movement? Or if not double tap an extended press. .like i fyou tap the ship goes there, if you hold for 2 or 3 seconds you get a little dialog where you can input specific coordinates?
How hard is it to do what they do with some video games now on mobile, where they show you a little UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT game pad type of thing on the screen and you can use that to fine tune ship movements? I have no idea if that's easy or not to accomplish.
I think what you are doing is awesome btw, so please don't take any of my criticisms the wrong way, they are totally meant to be 100% constructive :)
I'm happy with playing my turns on a regular comp but would love a tool which lets me observe and analyze stuff on my phone. Does the API make it possible to easily switch to past turns from, say, the starmap view?
I saw I won't have too much time during this week, so I decided to add a night shift to create a new build.
The new version includes:
Android 2.2 now supported also by popular demand :-)
When selecting a ship, planet or message, now there is a indicator on the map what was selected
Switching to background and foreground again is now more robust...but still not good and still has quite some room for improvement
Next I will try to find a feasible solution for ship and planet details and then let's see what we can do on movement.
@smn: The API supports moving between turns, but as I started long before this API was available, the app doesn't yet (the way I access the data doesn't support it either). Currently there's somethign missing in the API that prevents me from switching and even then it will be a major rework to include this, but I will do it eventually.
What you will find out after having played a few turns, there is a ship and ionstorm history in the map. It will show up to five last known positions for all ships you currently can see.
But I know about the value of a real history, so stay tuned, I will provide one.
here's a little feedback: - since today I can't view one of my 2 games. When loading it I see "Requesting rst", then "Parsing rst", then the games list comes back. It happened with both versions before and after the update. - The tracking lines are not 100% accurate. I have a ship that went from planet a to b (one turn distance) and then turned to somewhere else. On the starmap it looks like it turned between the two planets. - What happens after 100 turns? Will the map be covered by tracking lines? An option to switch them off/on would be nice. I like the feature btw.
BTW: when I installed the update from the market Google told me that someone who has installed the app also installed "Nethack" . Thanks for bringing my attention to this great ancient nerd game from former times. I loved to play it (decades ago) ....
The symptom you describe normally happens, if there is something completly unexpected in the RST and i saw this a lot after I joined the first stellar cartography game (and also when I joined the first game with 12 players...). I _think_ I covered everything that could appear in stellar cartography, but maybe I haven't seen everythign that could appear in those games yet. Do you see anything special in this game, that you haven't seen in any games before (an example, the same happened, when I encountered my first unowned ship due to a cluster)?
Currently the app tries to parse the RST and if there's something wrong it bails out...what I still have to implement is to provide more information if this happens.
I must admit though that I'm not 100% sure anymore to have opened the Innsmouth game with your app previously. Perhaps the error was there before.
Perhaps the problem is one of these: - there's a ghost ship sitting in a star cluster halo - there are star clusters/nebulas/asteroid fields and at some places they overlap (which should not happen - Joshua says it's fixed in newer games) - no ion storms
I re-checked and now it's working perfectly with my 2.2 tab. The app looks really good! Especially because everything worked... combat is a little small, but also the other tables are very helpful.
One of my games is missing, too. But it's paused by Joshua so maybe this is the reason?
Downloaded it to my Motorola Droid 2 Global, but I can't get it to login. I suspect it is because my userid has a space in it? It is "richard hendricks".
ok, shipp details are making progress. Not finished yet, but looks lik eit will be nice.
I also found the issue with the torpedoes (thanks to the admiral, I hardly fight with Torps myself)...though at the same time your comment arrived I also saw there's something wrong, I got a turn with a battle that I should win 100% against a torp ship...and lost it :-(
The first login is a little weird as the error message for not providing name/password is the same as for having a wrong combination. This is on my list of issues, but I have to admit not to far at the top as this happens only once normally :-)
Regarding the username with teh space in it, this normally should work as the field doesn't care for spaces, but this might really be the cause, though I will have to contact Joshua for this one.
finally the missing games, yes right now I only show active games, no training, no finished, no paused. I eventually will list all games, but first I have to check what this really means if a game is in any other state, how data changes etc.
The login with the space was a tough one, but finally it is fixed. It will be included in the next version.
Ship details are almost done, looks nice and useful.
Though the next version including those the fix and the feature still needs some more testing and a little tweaking, so I can not promise it will be ready by the end of the weekend. But I will try my best.
do you also have some spaces or other "unusual" characters in your username?
If not, yesterday, roughly at the time of your post have been at least two server restarts during which you couldn'T login. Is it still not working?
What error are you getting. There are other users with an S9000i and there it works fine...and I never got around buying a Transformer but I'm waitin gfor the Prime :-)
testet both again. Still Login not succesfull. Username + Password. Can´t see I made an error.
Edit: Don´t have any spaces ony an @. Edit2: Also the Test Account does not work on the Transformer
Btw. I was pissed about bying the Transformer (whished I´d bought something with Win7 or IOS). Android seems not ready for (Note)Pads, for Smartphones its o.k. . Most of my anger came, cause I couldn´t play Planets. Hope to get your app running, this will maybe change my view to Android on Pads :).
yes, the @ is the problem, same as for the space. Actually all non letters or numbers pose a problem right now as the server doesn't expect them encoded like all other servers...but the next version will fix this.
Regarding your Transformer, stay tuned for the Android 4 Upgrade. I've already seen some tablets with Android 4, really great.
@mark: see private mail, we can try...but I doubt it will work, normally the market filters "correct" meaning if you do not see it it won't run. As there are only three requirements for this app (internet, touchscreen and Androdi >2.2) I think you have Android 2.1 or lower. I saw someone inthe makret succeeding to run it there, but I doubt everyrhing works.
What device do you have?
@Chaos: Do you have "weird" characters in your username or password (anything except letters and numbers). there's a bug that I fixed already, but have it in the same version as the ship details. Bad practice, I know, but I didn't expect to take the details that long. If I do not succeed to release a version with the details tomorrrow, I will release a version containing only this fix.
I have a cheapo tablet (Coby Kyros) running 2.3. It should run it, but I can see how Market might be confused about it's capabilities since I had to root it just to get Market working at all.
beacon - I was able to log in using my home wireless network. I don't know what the difference is (unless the hot spot I was at somehow was filtering it...)
As I wrote yesterday, I released a new version today. Recent changes are
- Login problems with for usernames and passwords with spaces or other special characters are fixed (at least I hope now everythign should work)
- Ship details have finally arrived (though they still need some tweaking) Important, the calculation of the ship mass still seems to be buggy and therefore the calculation of fuel consumption is not available yet. I still have to understand the logic Joshua implemented there. Also there is currently no distinction between own ships, ally ships and enemy ships. This means, there is still information display for the latte rtwo that only makes sense for own ships. I still have to figure out, what exactly makes sense to display for the other ships.
- New setting to set the default action (show map, show details, show selector) in the ship list introduced
- Selecting a ship in the list in map view also opens ship details
- Zoom buttons available on map view now (to support devices without multitouch)
I have to admit I have done much less testing than I would like have done. But I wanted to release the login fix as soon as possible and therefore decided to skip some testing on the ship details. the next version will be mostly a maintenance release to fix any bugs that occur in the ship details.
@Chaos: maybe the network connection just wasn't "good enough". I saw today I have to improve on the error handling as sometimes the device thinks there is network while there isn't data flowing. Which actually leads to exactly the sympton you describe.
But I have to admit, this is also not on the top of my priority list, let's see when I will have time for this.
in the market I see there are two people usign the app with Android 2.1. Is one of yue following this thread?
As I didn't release the App for this version yet, I actuallly have two questions to you.
- how did you manage to install the app, the market shouldn't offer it to you
- does everything work? I hardly can believe this for a plain 2.1 device as I thought I'm using some API that have not been there before 2.2, even for the login. I also have a 2.1 (officially) device here (a pandigital) but this version in reality is somewhere between 2.1 and 2.2 and has those APIs implemented. What device are you using?
If it works fine on normal 2.1 devices I just could allow those to install it too...
Since the app still doesn't want to work with one of my two games (with Stellar Cartography) it'd be nice if you could add some means for debugging or error analysis. Users that run into bugs or problems could give you more and better feedback then.
I think I found a (minor) bug. Here's how to reproduce it: - read your messages - tap a "heavy/light industrial activity ..." message - the starmap opens and the respective planet is flashing (nice and useful actually) - zoom out - some spot in open space is flashing (not the planet)
hmm, I can't reproduce this. But otoh, I made quite some changes and improvemnts to the map rendering since the last release and maybe accidentally fixed this also.
BTW, the version having some debug code for your problematic game makes good progress, maybe it will be available this weekend already.
I've been using this quite a lot. It's a very nice tool and good for checking out the turn.
What features I miss the most: - Seeing the mission, friendly code and primary enemy of a ship on the starmap. - Seeing the industries, friendly code, mineral densities. growth rates etc of planets. This and the above would be very user friendly if they would open in an overlay or something when tapped on from the list on starmap. - Being able to read and send diplomatic messages. This would actually double or triple the amount of diplomacy I do.
snm: This is a great idea to have an additional overlay for the map. Right now I'm going to the details if clicking a ship on the map list, but this just doesn't feel right. I'll give this a try.
The Message functionality in the browser version has changed very much right before I released the Android Client...and I like the new browser UI. I'm already working on that and I also think sending and replying to messages might be one of the first feasible write operations that I should support.
- There's a debug mode now. If you have problems when loading a game, give it a try. To enable the debug mode, do a long press on a game in the list of games. It will save the whole RST as well as a debug file and try to send it via mail to me after parsing the RST. This _should_ work even if there's an error.
- Ship Details have now distance, fuel consumption, and arrival time implemented. Though warp wells are _not_ used yet
- Speed of loading a game was improved vastly, this was really a dumb mistake :-)
- Loading a game also can be cancelled now if you selected the wrong game. Just press back while the game is loaded
- The game list now should show the correct values for next host run and remaining time. Before this worked only for some time zones correct. If you still experience problems with those time, please send me a mail with the time you see in the app, the time the browser tells you and the timezone you're in
- Ships in planet are now displayed larger
- Map rendering has improved in speed
Someone gave feedback in the market that the ship history shows also a line if a ship gets destroyed and a ship with the same ID gets build somewhere else. Actually this is on purpose to show how the ship IDs are reassigned to you or your ally (and even more important which ones have been reassigned to someone else tio find out where the ship build queue is).
Question to all: do you think this is useful or doesn't it help but is confusing?
As I didn't receive any feedback from Android 2.1 users, is really nobody reading this thread?
I sent you the debug results for my problematic game. It seems the app has a problem with the non existent IonStorms. The ionstorms-json is an empty array.
Concerning your question about the build queue: If I think about it I find it more confusing that helpful. In an alliance you know where the build queue is. I admit that your feature reduces the need for more communication, but I'd rather prefer an indicator off the starmap (e.g. in the menue) that tells me the base id that is known to have last built a ship than confusing lines on the starmap. However I assume that's quite more work. Just my 2 cents though.
yeah, the files indicate something like this. I do not have access to the sources here in the office, but I thought I handled empty arrays for all things. Looks like I'm mistaken. I will take a look today in teh evening and might ven be able to release a new version fixing this single issue.
The good thing is, debug code seems to be working :-)
there's a version 1.05 in the market, this _should_ fix the problem with the ionstorms.
I do not have a game at hand to check it, but as I forgot to include the empty check only for ionstorms and the same code works for minefields and notes, it should be fine.
weird, I just checked on my Nook and I get offered the update to 1.05. Don't get confused by the date, for whatever reason it still shows Jan, 11th as last release date in the market on the phone as well as here
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.chfsoft.android.vgap
Also the description is still the same as for 1.04, I just added one line for the Ionstorms to recent changes.
I have to leave now for office, but if it still doesn't work in the evening, I will investigate it and try to upload another (identical) version 1.06, maybe the market got confused somehow :-)
ok - using the market app it was not possible to notice a new version - I had to deinstall the app and the reinstall it.
The new version in fact works better. I can now load my game that caused the problems with the older versions. I can see the starmap, planet list, messages, score. But when I want to see the ship list it crashes. This happens only in one of my games (with stellar cartography and about 90 ships).
Turning the device (portrait to landscape) while viewing the menu also causes the app to crash. This happens in both of my games.
If I can help you with debugging please let me know.
ok, the crash on the orientation change was...well, plain dumbness on my side fits quite well.
This happens if you do not test everything for every release...
Now let's see on the ship list issue. According to the log the ships have been parsed fine, you see quite a number of ships (the list contains all ships you see, not only your ships).
As you can see the map, do you also get the list at the left side that shows ships, planets etc. at a position? If there are ships, this is good. This means there is one ship with something that I didn't expect.
Is there anything visible if you go to the ship list, e.g. is the list on the top to select which ships to display already set to "own" or does the field count already contain a number? Does it happen immediatly when opening the screen or onyl after scrolling down?
Regardign debugging, you do not happen to have the Adnroid SDK installed (or maybe even Eclipse)? If so, the output from the command "adb logcat" while provoking the error would help me most.
If not, you can install the tool alogcat from the market. This will collect the same log information on the device. Handling this app is a little bit cumbersome, but for this case it is good enough to:
- start my app and go to the gamelist
- start alogcat
- select menu/clear
- switch back to my app
- load a game and try to display the ship list
- back to alogcat and select menu/share and send the log to me
I hope this will shed some light on the problem. If not, well then I have to create a small app that just tries to parse an RST from disk instead of the web. I still assume I will have to do this eventually, I'm pretty sure this is not the last problem of this type...
I found an easy way to load your RST into the App...and it worked fine, strange.
While analyzing the data a bit, I found a potential problem, it seems to be related to the ghost ships. Why this happens for you as soon as you open the list I don't know, I only saw it when showing all ships. Adn it didn'T crash but just skipped some ships...but well, at least an indication.
And this after I was pretty sure, I handled ghost ships correctly, well...
I'm not sure whether I will be awake long enough to upload another version tonight, but it should be available tomorrow.
- rotating the device in the gameview crashed the game, dumbness on my side...fixed
- there was a problem with ghost ships that is fixed
- still the fix introduced a new feature as well, in the ship list it is now possible to select unowned ships also, great for grabbing a few free ships :-)
Kwesy, I really hope this solves your ship list problem too...if not we have to investigate further. But at least on my device I could view your RST without any difficulties (though I also could do that before the fiy was there)
Now I hope there are no severe bugs left and I can go back to features again ;-)
Beacon, Really liking your tool for a quick checkup on game status. One minor bug, it looks like the ship on the right side of the VCR is not flipped left to right like it should be. Pretty funny watching me shoot torps up the other side's tailpipe. :)
While looking at the statistics in the Android Market, more than 50% are using devices with another language than English. Is there interest to have a localized version too? As the web site here is English, I didn't even think of this before, but who knows...
Great job, I'll try it this evening. Although I'm from Germany, I think that most players who like Planets are used to English as the main language in the game.
I'm a Spanish speaker, but as Nu is in English I prefer your tool in English, so I have the same names. If you translate it, maybe someone will get confused.
in case anybody wonders, I'm still working on improving the client, but there are so many ideas but only so much time...Well, the change in the RST format has forced me to release the version im using for four weeks now on my device. It is far from complete, but at least some visible changes have been made:
fix for new RST format that I encountered today in my turns
switched navigation to use the action bar as advised for Android Apps
optimized map drawing the be faster on slow devices (though I have to admit, it does look slower on fast devices, but it isn't). This is in preparation for many new types of information on the map in future versions
a lot of small changes for things that I didn't like, though nothign serious, so I forgot most of them already