Still Alive

Yes I am still alive. Just real busy at work. Will be getting back to work on the tools again real soon.

Current work

Things I am currently working on:

- Search Player view
- Moving player data code to its own class.
- Much needed code clean up.
- Looking intyo adding settinbgs to the iPhone settings widget to give a place for the user to set certain options like Squad they are in. This will be used for the Squad Members view.
- Doing some thinking into different UI designs. Using the Weather and Stock widgets as inspiration.

Oh noes...Beta 4!

A new beta release of the SDK. Downloading now. I hope it doesn't break anything.  :p

Tappable medals

I have made the medals tappable now. When it is completed it will display the medal name and what it is awarded for.

Select Online JGC Player Medals

I got it working now where when you select the player form the online list, it pulls that players medal data from the live game and displays medals. Got some more work to do on it to make the cell big enough to fit all the medals. 

Player data

Nothing special here. Just posting a layout of how I will store player data

JGC Online Pilots

I went ahead and learned how to load data from a website and parse it out to get the list on Online pilots from JGC.

Medal whores rejoice!!

Got the basic functionality down to dynamically show earned medals. Looks pretty snazzy. I am also going to add later the ability to tap a medal and a popup will give a description of what the merit or demerit is for. Note that those are JGC medals. I just pulled a few from JOSSH to get the basics done.

SDK Beta 3

A new beta of the Software Dev Kit was out yesterday. I already got JGEM Tools updated to reflect the changes.

Other small points of interest. I made some new placeholder Tab Bar icons (the bar along the bottom). One is the TRI symbol, sorta, for the Leaderboard/Top players view, a lightning bolt for Online players, and a magnifying glass for Search. They suck and are jagged looking because I did them realy low resolution using a pixel editor. Later on I will design better ones using GIMP. I just wanted to change out the icons I was previously using that I pulled from a sample iPhone application.

The current plan is to get a basic look done to dynamically load up the medal icons and place them neatly in rows. After that will come the Search view page to search for a pilot name. Third priority will be to begin some rudimentary loading of a website nad pulling the html data. Unless by some small chance we get more concrete information on how player data is going to be presented I plan on doing some tests with pulling JGC data and parsing that into the views to get something closer to an actual real working application.

Video

 I recorded this quick video of the tool in action. Just to give an idea of how it works.

Player detail view

I got some basics beginning on the player detail view. What you see in the image is after you select a player from the list. It currently shows the faction icon, squad, and level. That section will also contain squad rank, experience, and maybe credits. Two other sections will also be on that page. The 2nd will contain medals and the third will list all the other stats like kills and percentages. If anyone has any other thoughts on how this should look, ideas are welcome. Depending on how hectic this week is, I will get a basic medal group done before the weekend.

ARGGGH!

What a pain in the butt!! So I have been going nuts over loading an XML file into the Tableview to show player names and just could not get the damn thing to work. After hours of fiddling and reading I finally realized it was a screw up in my XML file. Ugh. At any rate, that is another hurdle jumped as you can see in the picture to the left. Just 2 random pilot names. Now it is time to begin work on the player view where it will show their stats and medals.

Busy

Been a little busy lately. I am about to get loaded with more responsibility at work as I am going to be the new Team Manager. I have been doing studying but not a lot of coding. But I expect to get some coding done this weekend. My priority is to go ahead and get a better understanding of loading and displaying data from an XML file. After that I will start working towards some design ideas for the actual player view.

D'oh!

So I was working on understanding how to populate the table view wih data from a plist (XML file) and I wake up this morning to the news that the iPhone SDK is now at beta 2. There has been some changes that is going to make me have to start over again. But it is all good. I have learned alot and now they have included the Interface Builder now which should make creating the UI easier.

More stuff learned today

Learned how to add the Navigation Bar so that it displays the section title and will have the back button when you drill down to the player view. Baby steps. Baby steps.

Brainstorming flow

Nothing import here. Just some ideas on the different views.

Main Interface Coming To Life

Well I have gotten the basic interface created. What you are seeing in this shot is the main list view where the list of pilots will show up and a toolbar that goes to 4 different views. 

• Top Players - These are players that are currently holding a top position in any stat. For example, the player with most kills, or most time played, etc. The list will look different than just a list of the pilots. There will be a sub heading in a smaller font that will tell what they are top in. And like all the views, when you tap the player, it will go to a detailed view of that pilot.
• Online Players - These are players that are currently online. I'd like to have this update in real time and maybe have it alert you if certain players some on, but alas that is not doable by Apple's user agreement for iPhone apps. But maybe this will change.
• Search - This is where you will go to search for a specific player. The list will be the same as you see, but a text bar will show up where you can type in the player name.
• Squad Members - This will be a list of other players in the same squad as you. I will have an option where you set the name of your squad and your own characters name.

I am considering a favorites view too where you can add you favorite players to a seperate list for quick lookup.

As always, everything is subject to change as more info about how this data is going to be handled by NetDevil.

Om my god. It's......an icon!

This is just a quick screen shot showing an application icon in the iPhone simulator. Nothing much to see here really. That is all I got right now.

Welcome to the jungle

Hi there my fellow JGE hopefuls and owners of the iPhone/iPod Touch. I have set up this blog to inform you of my progress with creating a set of mobile tools for Jumpgate Evolution. Currently I am in the early stages of design for a player lookup tool as well as learning the iPhone platform via the recently released  SDK. I will be providing design documents, screenshots, and videos as the become available. Please note there is currently no real player lookup tool for JGE as the game isn't even on beta so anything you see will be with dummy data or I may use the Jumpgate Classic game's data for now. For right now this is all prototyping and learning. So stay tuned.