Gavin Pugh - A Videogame Programming Blog

It’s been a while!

I’ve been pretty busy in recent months. Some of the press about Neversoft last month may give some clues. I’ve been sitting on a new vs-android for a very long time now, which contains some nice improvements. Unfortunately I just never got a block of time together, to finish it up for a release.

As well as it seemingly always stuck at the top of my “TODO” list, what also prompted me to get it done was a breaking update in the r8b NDK. Google like to move around their directory layout, and rename things from time to time. 🙂 The latest NDK also added support for GCC 4.6, as well as the MIPS architecture toolchain. So I implemented functionality in vs-android for all of that.

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If you’re a developer and you’ve picked up the Kindle Fire this past week, you may still be in the Honeymoon period with the device. 🙂 If that is starting to wear off by now, you may have the inkling to try writing code for it. If you’ve previously developed software for Android, you’ll be a little worried when you first connect it up. Out of the box, you can’t develop with it right away.

Thankfully, it’s not too complex to get things working. Thanks to some existing blog posts, it was hardly difficult to figure it out. I thought I’d write up my install process, for anyone specifically developing on a Windows machine. I’m sure by now though, a week after launch there’s plenty of info out there. I’m also wanting to flex my blog-writing muscle again, just to get something written and maintain my recent uptick in pace.

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In an effort to post more often in this blog, I’m writing up a minor vs-android update. I don’t usually write here about the minor version changes, I usually just fire out a tweet when I do those.

I actually started work on this one, the evening after I published XNACPC. I was going to fix some of the issues of vs-android, which were posted to the Google Code page. One of them was related to a new Android SDK (the Java/apk building counterpart to C++’s NDK), which caused issues when building the vs-android samples. So I went and downloaded the new SDK. I also figured I should grab the r6b NDK, which had been out a while now but I hadn’t updated to yet. To my surprise NDK r7 was out! Coincidentally it was posted up the very same day I decided to check it. Spooky.

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So, it’s been quite a while since I last posted on this blog. I’ve been pretty busy the past few months with various things. At work we had an important milestone during that time, which thankfully passed with flying colors. Outside of work though, I actually got married a couple of months ago! My wife and I eloped to Hawaii, just the two of us, and tied the knot. 🙂

So it’s been quite a busy period recently for me. Starting on vs-android back in January probably wasn’t the best timing. Getting it done wasn’t too bad; it was more the follow-up support email period that was tougher to deal with. More so, given the marriage preparations and what have you, which I was going through at the time. So vs-android got left by the wayside a while, and rightfully so!

A couple of weeks ago though, I picked up the project again. I was determined primarily to fix the dependency issues the previous version had. After looking again at what Microsoft had done with their Win32 toolchain, I decided to massively change my approach. I went from a system that was built primarily with MSBuild, with a little C# to sanitize pathnames and switches. To a system which had almost all of it’s moving parts in C#, with MSBuild just ferrying the project data into it.

That was pretty much the basis for the latest iteration of vs-android. I bolted on a few other things along the way, but for the most part it was just about getting it into a stable and reliable state.

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About six weeks ago I moved into that club which everyone else seemed to be part of, but not me. I joined the ranks of smartphone owners! No more 90’s flip-phone; I picked up a recent-ish Android handset. I’d never really been too into the whole concept of smartphone, but was starting to feel a little left behind. I must say that after those few weeks I’m sold, these things are pretty cool.

So, what’s a programmer to do? I think I may have actually downloaded the Android SDK before I even received the phone. Yeah, just a little bit eager! It’s actually the second handheld device I’ve tried to code on. The first being the Tapwave Zodiac, also with an arm processor and touchscreen. I never really got anything worthwhile going on it, my excuse being a job hunt and subsequent move to the United States. But nonetheless, it was a fun little handheld to code for. I was certainly looking forward to coding on a much more popular device.

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