Bandits at 10 o'clock

So, having failed to get actual employment, I've been playing around with Android development.  This did involve learning Java.  Not exactly hard, although I keep finding little niggles with the language where I miss the control of C.

The current project is a conversion of the Amiga game - Biplanes. 

So far, I have:

• Start screen
• Game screen
• Plane "physics",
• Basic enemy AI,
• Collision detection.
• Obstacles

What I need to add

• Explosions
• Scoring
• End game screen
• Setup screens
• Sound
• Credits Screen
• Multiplayer options.
• Improved AI.
• Improved collision detection
• Lots of playtesting.
• Debugging.
• New control system.
• Probably lots of other niggling details that will come up

Right now I'm playing with explosions.  I thought I'd have a go at converting the plane sprite into a series of dots and moving them separately.  I discovered that Android doesn't seem to allow me to apply textures to points.  I used a colour buffer array instead.  I discovered that Android also has a really bad implementation of the only method of directly copying an array of floats to a buffer.  I have to do a bitwise conversion to integer one one element at a time.  Very annoying.  And still not all that fast.

I've decided that probably isn't the best way of doing things.  Instead I'll just do a simple particle system.  This just involves reminding myself how OpenGL point sprites work.

I frequently find myself missing the elegance of C. I so need to learn to use JNI.  One thing at a time though.  How I envy those iPhone developers who can write in C without jumping through hoops.