Cropped

So it's been a few weeks since I sat down to seriously do some Android programming. I'd never done Java before but have a previous life as a 'C' programmer. Upon first looking at Java, the code seemed pretty familiar and I optimistically felt making the change would be relatively trouble-free.

That's not quite been the case but with some perseverance, I've started making some progress. It's been an awfully long time since I did some coding, longer still since I had to learn anything new.

In the mid 90s, I taught myself 68000 assembler for the Amiga and learned how to use the various custom chips on that system. Being young and at college at the time, it took a couple of years before I produced anything decent. Two years seems an awfully long time now so I'm more focused in order to produce something useful sooner.

Back then I had two books - Amiga Machine Language and the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual. Now I've got, it seems, the entirety of human knowledge available to me via the internet. And that's been quite a problem - there's much dross, opinion and discussion about every possible topic so it's hard to weed out useful information and answers to my questions.

Still, I'm happy to report modest progress in the few short hours I've been developing for Android.

The world doesn't need another block game

Doesn't look like much, I know. Java on Android is a bit fiddly to set up so just getting a blank screen to draw on was a faff.

So far, all my test app does is load some resources - a couple of PNG images and a WAV sound file. The squares are the beginnings of a 2D level and the man is, well, just a man at the moment. He responds to touch input and moves to wherever you touch the screen.

Tonight, I have two outstanding issues, both with the map drawing. The squares are being cropped to the top left quartile and for some reason the map is being displayed sideways. I've had to set the tile size to 200% the actual size to get them to display correctly. More fiddling is needed - I suspect something to do with pixel density at this point but to be honest, I have only the smallest idea what I'm doing.