Kev's Development Toolbox

October 10, 2007

TiVo on Comcast behind schedule

I’ve been following the eventual rollout of TiVo to Comcast users recently since we’ve been stuck with a DirecTivo box for a number of years now and I’m looking for an HD upgrade path. I say ‘stuck’ loosely, since we love TiVo. TiVo is awesome – there is no going back, and nothing else will do. The problem with the DirecTV Tivo box is that we can’t upgrade to DirecTV’s HD service because we’d lose our TiVo box (with paidup lifetime subscription – we’ve had free service for something like 5+ years now) since DirecTV broke their relationship with TiVo sometime back, and their own ‘homegrown’ DVR is just not any good in comparision with TiVo, according to existing owners.

So moving to Comcast is one option open, and I think even now it would be possible to buy a standalone HD TiVo unit and use it in conjunction with a Comcast cable box, or wait until they get the integrated boxes available.

October 9, 2007

Basic 2d game engine with sprite collision detection

I’ve spent a few hours playing around with the Java2D api over the weekend, and with the tutorial on this site, I’ve got a basic framework for implementing a simple 2D game. So far I’ve got a keyboard handler to control the player’s movement and collision detection against solid objects. You can move the player character around the screen and with solid objects (tiles) on the screen it wouldn’t be too far from this point to implement a simple maze or platform game.

At this point this is probably more than I need since I was thinking of implementing a version of one of the original Game & Watch games as a starting point. I’ll keep you posted on how I progress and at some point I’ll also post the source.

October 9, 2007

Articles and tutorials for learning JavaFX

If you’ve been thinking of getting into JavaFX, Sun’s Java answer to Flash, Sun has a number of articles and tutorials on the java.sun.com site, starting with this intro article. Look on the far right for a list of other follow on articles.

October 8, 2007

Writing a 2D arcade game using Java2D API

Every now and again I get the urge to develop a game in Java, but I never get it complete. I’ve done a few prototypes modeling bouncing balls and simplified gravity on moving objects, but have never finished a game to completion (in Java at least – I wrote some simple games in Sinclair BASIC almost 20 years ago, and also a 2D side scroller variant in STOS BASIC on the Atari ST sometime in the late 80s).

Once of my main hurdles in Java has been ‘how do I get stuff on the screen?’. I’ve tried things in Applets using the Graphics Class, and also looked at very simple tile-based graphic layouts using, of all things, a GridLayout in Swing. I just found this tutorial however, which shows incredibly simply, how to the the Java2D api to write images to the screen using Buffering. This is an awesome article because it bridges the gap for me – I’ve read a few Java2D articles and skimmed through the Java2D online tutorials, and the part that seems to be missing in most is how you actually get an instance of the Graphics2D class. Now to go away and do something creative 🙂 Actually, I’m going to have a crack at a Nintendo ‘Game & Watch’ style simple game…. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…

(I don’t know which came first, but the article mentioned above is also extended somewhat in this other article – you can see there are name changes, but it’s the same code… I get the feeling the first article came first…)