Android touch input problem - java

In my little game, I have a background and a player, and obstacles to prevent the player from gaining points. So the player needs to move to avid these obstacles, right? Well my method of taking touch input works and when the user touches the right/left side of the screen to move in the corresponding direction. For some reason my method requires the user to tap the screen once for every single movement (4 pixels) of the player. I want the user to be able to hold their finger down on the direction they wish to go, and not have to continually tap that side of the screen a few hundred times. I'm pretty new to android, so I don't really know how to implement this. I have tried a game loop (it just crashed my game), and I've tried a separate thread to try and repeat the action, but it never gets executed even after I call "game.run()" and with "game.start()" it crashes. Can anyone show me a simple way to make it to where me player will keep moving when holding your finger on the side you wish to move towards? I imagine it's simple and I'm over complicating it, but I am a little clueless. Please provide an example, and not just a "Do it like that" etc. Because again, I am a little clueless in this department. Code pastebin'd below.
My code: http://pastebin.com/3EetUHCx

You want to create a new Runnable object in which to put the code, not to implement Runnable in the main class. That way you will separate the event handling from the main UI.
Even a better option would be to extend SurfaceView instead of View in your Draw class and create a Tread object inside that SurfaceView to handle the actual drawing.
Take a look at the Lunar Lander example from the android dev guide.

Related

How to take two time-based inputs from a user without calling wait() or yield()

I'm currently in the process of making a game in Java. I've recently been working on mouse input, and where I'm stuck has to do with the game recognizing when the mouse has moved. I've obviously gotten it to accept mouse input, but I can't make the in-game player rotate correctly based upon mouse position.
What I can come up with to fix it is to take a measurement of the mouse's x position at one point in time, and then compare it to another measurement one millisecond later to see whether or not the mouse has moved, and if so, to get the player to rotate linearly faster with the distance the mouse has translated.
However, I have no idea how to do that without forcing the entire program to wait or yield (which would be bad).
I've tried writing the position to a file and then re-reading it immediately after, but it tends to read from the file at different rates, causing the rotation to be spastic and uneven. But besides that, I'm open to ideas. I can't really post my code because there are many class files that go into the program, but if necessary, I can post the whole project to github for anyone to look at.
GitHub Repository link: https://github.com/isl1/Duplicity
P.S. If it helps, I'm using LWJGL 3, paulscode, and Slick-Util on Eclipse Mars.

Quick Time Event in Swing [pseudocode request]

I am in the extremely early stages of designing a game (so early that I haven't even committed to it yet). The idea is an RPG with a Quick Time Event for attacking and defending that relies on precise mouse movements or timed button presses to reduce damage taken or increase the damage of an attack (similar to Mario and Luigi or Paper Mario). I'm wondering the best way to go about programming a class that can handle this. Ultimately, I'd like to be able to write code such as this when I call the attack function, where all of the functionality of the QTE occurs in a single function call;
//Example code.
int attackPower = 23;
double qteSucessPercent = -1;
//more code
if(e.getSource == player.sword()) //when the player chooses to execute a sword attack.
{
qteSucessPercent = QTE.Jump();
if(qteSucessPercent< 0)
throw BadQTEException;
else if(qteSucessPercent>= .9)
player.attack(enemy[0], attackPower*2);
else if(qteSucessPercent>= .75)
player.attack(enemy[0], attackPower*1.5);
else if(qteSucessRate>= .5)
player.attack(enemy[0], attackPower);
else
System.out.println("Attack Failed");
}
This class needs to do several things.
It needs to be able to draw itself.
The QTE class needs to be able to handle key pressing or mouse motion events. I can handle the code for each type of QTE I wish to implement, but they need to be able to detect, on their own, where the mouse is and what buttons are being pressed.
Whatever it is drawing needs to delete itself once the QTE is over.
There will be multiple types of Quick Time Events. Each one will be drawn differently, have different victory conditions (one may require you to hit a sequence of buttons in the correct order, another may make you press a single button in rapid succession as many times as you can, ect), and modify the attack in various ways. The basic design of all QTEs is that they return a double value between 0 and 1, depending on how well the player did (generally, the higher the number, the better; if the attack returns 0, then the QTE received no input at all). In some situations, the QTE may be pass/fail, but the rest of the program is just watching for a non-0 number to be passed from the function call. For the sword, the attack's power is being modified by how well you do.
I know Swing isn't thread-safe (which, to my knowledge, means components won't update properly if you try to activate parts of their code from a thread other than the one you called them with, meaning I can't have two blocks of code executing at the same time if I want both sets of code to display animations), which is why I've written the code the way I have. The main thread gets to line 6, and executes QTE.Sword(). Until QTE.Sword() returns (which could be as long as five seconds), the rest of the program will freeze and not animate. I plan to use this to my advantage to achieve a bullet time effect, where the only thing animating is the QTE and the players and enemies remain stationary - though if I wanted an animation, like for a Mario and Luigi-like jump QTE, I'd set the player's sprite to be an animated gif that only plays once and only for as long as the QTE goes off.
Note that I am NOT ASKING FOR CODE. I'm asking for either pseudo-code or just a paragraph explanation of how I could program this. I think I can find a dead, open-sourced project on Github or Google Code and figure out the basics of the rest of the engine from there, but this is really the sticking point for me. Also, I am not asking for help handling mouse movements or keyboard presses. I have enough knowledge to code these on my own - I'm just not sure how to implement this in the context of an RPG. I know this isn't really stackoverflow's thing, and this question will probably get deleted, but I figure this is the best place to ask this sort of thing.

Andengine Parallax Background

Background:
I am making a 2D side-scroller.
When the player touches the screen, the player moves forward (the camera follows the player).
I cannot find an answer to this question although it seems rather straightforward.
Question:
How can I get my parallax background to scroll only when my player moves?
(example code would make things much easier for me)
I am using autoparallaxbackground but it seems that it simply just scrolls at the rates you pass in, with no regard to the camera. Moreover, I am not fully sure of the difference between autoparallaxbackground and parallaxbackground.
Any help is appreciated!
AutoParallaxBackground extends ParallaxBackground, adding one simple feature: automatically changing mParallaxValue with time. As you may imagine, if you don't need your background constantly moving, you may use ParallaxBackground as your base class, and then use setParallaxValue(final float pParallaxValue) to manually adjust the position.

designing a project in java

I don't know exactly how to design a project. It's my first year at my computer science department. I'm still learning a lot of information about Java, such as inheritance, polymorphism, abstract classes, interfaces, and so on. I am really curious about these lectures and I'm willing to learn them well. Actually I've not missed any point in these lectures and I got those very well. But nobody teach me how to desing a project and we are supposed to design a decent Java project at the very end of school.
I and my 3 classmates have decided to make a new game. It is played with only one ball and the ball has changeable two colours. Also two players have the same colour with this ball's colours. When the ball is at one player's colour, this player will be able to move the ball and try to score to another player's goal. These are our idea's basic logic and we can add some new facilities and options for this game. We are so willing to achieve this project. But... although we listen and learn from our lectures, we are really confused about to design this project step-by-step. I've just tried to demonstrate our project's logic. Meanwhile, we are still learning about GUI but we are at the very beginning of GUI. So I want to understand about what kind of ways we have to follow in order to design and make this kind of project. I just want to know about tricks and shortcuts and make the most of our knowledge about class hierachies, abstract classes, superclasses, overriding, etc.(We know everything about this terms but just don't know how to use them to design a project). If you can indicate even a little info about these, I would be so so so happy and able to change my point of view. And it would facilitate our progress. Thank you!
You might want to have a look at this Java Pong Game - it's pretty simple and includes some source code that you can study.
More general advice:
You need some way to display what is happening in the game. Probably the easiest way to display the screen in a very simple game is to use a JPanel and override it's paintComponent() method to draw the game screen correctly (e.g. draw players at the right x,y locations)
You will also need a game loop that should do the following things:
Reads any input from players
Update the positions of the objects in the game
call repaint() on the JPanel so that the screen gets redrawn
Waits a short amount of time using e.g. Thread.sleep(30) to sleep for 30 milliseconds
Loops back to the start of the game loop
I would recommend separating the classes that define the user interface (frames, panels etc.) from classes that define the game logic (players, balls etc.). Ideally the game logic classes shouldn't contain any code that relates to how they are displayed or interacted with.
For a game this simple, you don't actually need many classes. I'd recommend something like:
App - contains the main(...) function which launches the game. At a minimum it should create a JFrame and add a single GamePanel inside it, but you can create other UI elements if you like. You may choose to implement your game loop also in this class - in which case the main method should call this once all the setup has been done.
GamePanel (which extends JPanel) - contains the screen drawing logic, also perhaps detects mouse movement
Game - class that represents the entire state of the game, including the locations of both players and the ball
Player - small class to represent the player, with x,y co-ordinates
Ball - small class to represent the ball, with x,y co-ordinates and dx,dy velocity
GUI isn't really suitable for making a game.
a GUI (Graphical User Intreface, Swing in java) is a set of buttons and other text/image content, as opposed to something you can make a game with: a 3D rendering engine, such as OpenGL (most commonly used on java, be it in a framework or through low level libraries).
You here have a choice:
you can either decide to do a simpler project, for example a console program, but that will run on a GUI, for example a GUI program to move files.
or you can get to learning OpenGL or similar (JOGL for java) and make that game!
(JavaFX also might work, but I don't know much about it)
Now about design.
Generally you want to have a main "looping" class that will output every frame etc.
The main "looping" class should inherit from an interface that allows all other components to get the rendering particle, the time counter etc.
Then you want several components, one for the ball, one for any other physics object (don't forget to make them implement a "physics" interface and add them as "physical object references" in your main class, so that the physics for them are calculated each frame!), one for the background, and one for user input.
You can also add multiple others that will each do a specific action.

Differentiate Between Robot mouseclick and human mouse click

I have an applet that I'm running online and I want to make sure people can't use the java Robot class to operate the applet. I know that yahoo does this on several of their game platforms and I was wondering if anyone knew how they accomplished it.
Watch mouse movement, and make sure you're not seeing "jumps" from one place to another, but movement over time instead. Sun/Oracle's J2SE tutorials show how to follow mouse movement events: http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/events/mousemotionlistener.html
Keep in mind that this would potentially fail to detect the difference between a robot and a person on something like a touch screen, or tablet input device.
One more thing to watch for is whether the user is clicking the same pixel, or just in the same vicinity. Humans are fairly imprecise, robots generally aren't unless programmed to be.
I would also put in a gesture logger for good measure that compiles this information, and keeps track of the actual movements of your users. If you suspect someone of cheating, you can then look at what their actual mouse movements looked like, and compare that with a known person. That will give you a better idea of what you need to look for than any of us can come up with off the tops of our heads.
keep track of the distribution of mouse positions over time. Humans move the mouse differently than a robot that knows exactly where to position it every single time it is clicked. Of course, a smarter robot can counter this defense.

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