Programming My Life

A few weeks ago, I started getting a recurring notification on my Droid Incredible telling me that ‘Application Space is low’.  After removing some apps and moving others to the SD card, the notification continued popping up.  I checked the amount of space available for each storage device in the phone (memory, internal storage, and SD card), and all three had plenty of space left.

After some searching, I found that before a factory reset (something I did not want to do), some other users had found clearing application cache could solve the problem. You can do this by clicking the notification (or if it isn’t currently up, going to Setting > Applications), sort by size, then go through the largest applications (likely Mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), click the name, then click, ‘Clear Data’.  After doing this for several of the largest apps (and moving apps to SD earlier), the notification has not returned for a few weeks now.

I wanted to post this in hopes that anyone else with this problem can solve it without a factory reset. Good luck!

While I don’t use VNC to log into my home PC very often, it is a nice convenience to have if I want to check something on my home PC while I’m at work or out of town.  I recently moved to a new apartment and upon getting my PC set up (before the furniture, naturally), I saw that TightVNC no longer seemed to be working.  I tried a few simple fixes, but with no pressing reasons to use VNC, I put off setting it up.

Last night, I become determined to fix it for no apparent reason.  After trying to disable the Windows firewall (which I promptly put back up), I got frustrated again.  I considered that maybe I was missing something simple, so I asked a tech-savvy friend* if he could think of anything.  This morning he got back to me suggesting that my router might be blocking the ports that need to be accessed.  I knew this was wrong because 1)  I did that when I set up AndroidVNC, and 2) I had checked it after the problem arose.  His advice did, however, make me realize that I had not tried taking the router out of the equation to make sure it wasn’t the culprit.

To test whether my VNC server was working or not (since I had to unplug my wireless router), I used GoToMyVNC.  Without the router, I was able to get a connection on GoToMyVNC.  Clearly, the router was the culprit.  I decided to simply retrace my steps through the VNC set up I outlined on my blog for AndroidVNC (see above) to see if something had changed with the move.  Turns out, my local IP address (on the router) had changed by 1. I corrected this and now I’m back in business.

I wanted to post this mostly to show that, for the first time, blogging has helped me by having steps to retrace without having to redo the research for a simple project.

*Thanks, Nigel

Currently, my job is to create a game to teach astronomy to middle school students. Luckily for me, there is an abundance of options for game engines to help me ranging from the simple and free (Scratch and Alice) to the expensive and complex (Unreal, etc). For our project we wanted an engine deep enough to cover multiple game types in one game that was reasonably priced.  After debating over the 2D vs. 3D issue, I decided 3D might be too complex for the style of game we wanted to create.  However, after prototyping a few game ideas in several different engines, we settled on Unity for its flexibility and affordability (free for the indie version $1200 for the pro version).  Even though it is primarily a 3D engine, 2D games can be made without much trouble.

In order to get familiar with the Unity engine, I followed two tutorials I found in the Unity forums. The first was a basic shmup.

The second tutorial was a redux (in C#)  of the first plus an extension that included models for the ship and asteroid.  While I followed along with this tutorial, I decided to keep everything in JavaScript.  This helped me to clarify some of the elements of the Unity engine independent of language.

After completing the tutorials, I decided to extend the game a bit to include bombs, more asteroids and large asteroids.  As of this writing, I haven’t made final decisions for how to complete the game (whether it will be a score the player must or a set time limit), but the current version can be found here:

http://programmingmylife.com/spaceShooter/spaceShooter.html

Unity makes the process of uploading any game you build in the engine to a website incredibly easy.  When making a build of a game you simply have to use the following settings:

File >  Build settings > web player      (make sure to include all scenes)

When you build the game it will create a *.unity and a *.html file (the * represents the name of the game that you set).  Assuming your web host knows what to do with the .unity file, you can simply upload the two files and the game will run at that web location.  If, like me, your web host doesn’t support the .unity file format likely this will cause your browser to fail to download the content.  I received an error on Chrome stating ‘Failed to download data file’ with details ‘Download failed, try again’, but on Firefox, the download status simply stayed at zero. To fix this,  you will simply need to include in the directory with the .unity and .html file the following in a file called web.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>

        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".unity3d" mimeType="application/vnd.unity" />

     </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>

</configuration>

I was able to find these instructions from this query at Unity Answers.  Unity Answers is a great service that runs in addition to the Unity forums.  These two complementary services along with the users give Unity a strong community that should allow users from novice to advanced to find answers to any problems they might have.