ill again

Well, I’ll reinstate all the things I said about Nokia in the first place. The new 2.0 Beta JDK is horrendous for LCAP2 Bluetooth. It crashes out with out telling you, it corrupts the data between cell phones and the worst crime is;- it raises no exceptions when it does.

The upshot is for finishing off and writing this section of this game, I’ve had to roll back to the 0.3.1 beta just to get going again. I’ve lost a week on this as well. However, it’s not a total loss. I’m now going to be able to code the Lookup algorithm I wanted to on the 2.0 JDK once I’ve got the actual game working on the 0.3 JDK. This will save on the actual hardware coding time because it was not possible on the other JDKs.

There is one other piece of code I would like to put into the game, but I don’t know how it could be done. N-Gage snakes allow you to transmit the game to other users via Bluetooth. I would love to be able to do that. I’ll have to ask about doing the . Problem is that Real Life is very hectic at the moment and the amount of time that could be assigned to doing this is not very much. Still, I’ve got a day off work on Friday so I should be able to concentrate on it then.

Another thing I have noticed is how slow it is to create the XML from the interface. Dependant on how complex the Map is, the longer it takes. This I’m going to have to rectify by generating the XML as soon as the Map is generated and then tag the playing pieces XML on top of that.

I’ve also found a bug in the decoding. Each Data Structure is broken down into 128 bytes packets and then passed to the next cell which then builds up and amalgamates these into an Array. In order to show where the structure ends a ‘/n’ byte is sent at the very end.
The responding cell phone has then got to look for this ‘/n’ to say it’s got the data.

So instead of checking just the latest 128 packet for the ‘/n’, the code was looking through the entire input array instead. This means that the 1000 ms response timeout was being missed and the whole process hung. Doh!