Good Lord, Has it been that long?!?

I'm suprised that the blog is still here.

Well, what's been happening? Lets see;-

Lots, but nothing with the game. Due to personnal commitments, I haven't managed to do any significant development or fixing of bugs for the last 12-18 months. The last update was version 1.17 for all the Nokia's and Sony Erricsons.

Yup, it's almost four years in development, or should that be refinement. It also doesn't help that the Nokia N80, which I've been using for my main mobile test platform, has a fault with it's bluetooth, so effectivly all the error's I've been getting are due to a faulty handset and not my code. But that's only taken six months (and a new Nokia n95) to that figure out.

However, there is new functionality in there and I've finally got the threading model working properly. I had Blocking threads causing me headaches everywhere. There's been a lot of tidying up and streamling. The Size of the Jar remains at about 130K.

What's New:-

1. New Single Player game called 'FIREWALL'. - The single player is still there but this is a refinement to the original. It's a case of How long can you keep your phone from being hacked, with the Interphace redesigning it'self every five seconds or so.
2. New Custom graphic menus - This includes all the status pages from the Bluetooth menus. It's this which has been causing the headaches.
3. Automatic Bluetooth - You can put the game into automatic mode and the game will alert you to when a player comes into range. This means that the game is being both a client and a server at the same time.
4. Dynamic Advertising. - In order to get some funding for the next level, I've included some dynamic Advertising. When a player syncronises their score, a small request is made to the Interphace website. If the user doesn't have the latest advert, then, the advert is downloaded and displayed at a game end or on the splash screen.
5. Viral Distribution. - In order for the free version of this game to people, I've included a version of it within the game itself. This can be sent to other compatible handsets over the bluetooth link that support installation from the inbox.
6. The inclusion of the latest RumbleX functionality, which allows users upload their scores.
7. The User_One function - Anybody who challanges User 1 and wins gets 1000 MP points

Options 2, 3 and 7 have been fully tested and coding is well on the way for the others. I have wasted so much time with the motorola version, and doing a seporate version for the double display size for the N80, that the commercial version would have been completed by now.

There are new Motorola handsets out there which should be able to handle the game better, but I'm scared to test them. And don't get me started about retesting on another N80.....

There is one more important issue. For all this development, I've been using JBuilder X Mobile edition. Borland have now stopped development of the JBuilder IDE so that means the latest development environments from Nokia and Sony no longer support my IDE. This means I'll have to learn a new IDE. I'll see what choices I have soon but I'll release this version using JBuilder X and then I'll move on. You never know, someone might want my copy on ebay.

Even when I complete all this, I've got to redo the Interphace website. I was getting almost 1000 spams a day through it, until I shut down the email on it. Apparently there a lot of girls from Russia who'd like to meet me.