Final Days

Now that we're approaching the final days of this class, and for me LASA, we're getting ourselves into the final project. The final for this class is robocode which is a coding based competition in which everyone/every team codes a robot and has them fight each other. There are a lot of factors in this competion which is important to know to win. The basic design for any robot will be trying to avoid the opposition's bullets, while tracking and shooting the opponents without hurting yourself too much in the process. The thing is, you hurt yourself while shooting so this might be a negative impact to your robot if all you do is rapid fire and hope you hit the target. On the other hand, if you make contact you regain some of the health back, so as long as you're conservative and accurate you should be alright. I still have to make many improvements because there's not much to my robot right now, but by the time we compete, hopefully I'll have something successful.

Final stuff aside, let's look at the year as a whole. Way back in the first semester, my group, struggled to find a project to work on. Placing three seniors in the same group wasn't the smartest idea and this hindered our progress significantly. Using Mr. Stephen's advice we came across an android tutorial from Mike Scott who works at UT Austin. Going through the multiple tutorials is what kept us busy the entire year. I remember getting stumped at around the third tutorial. Being stuck at the same tutorials for weeks got us so demoralized that we thought about switching projects completely. Then with luck, we got assistance from Mr. Tessler and another volunteer. They helped us understand what we were getting wrong with our Tic-Tac-Toe app. The issue was that the computer was actually playing out the moves that it reading ahead. Our code was only supposed to have the computer play a move and then prepare to block a win, or make a winning move. Instead of thinking/preparing for these moves, the computer would actually play it, which would lead to some cheating situations. Sometimes the computer would actually play over our moves, and sometimes it would play more than once, either way it was far away from a well-developed app. After fixing the error, the app worked flawlessly and the things to follow was just us messing around with this the graphical design which involved coding in XML. The nice thing about eclipse was that it auto filled a lot of the code out so most of what we did was drag buttons and text fields onto the screen, and then using their id's, implemented them with JAVA code to give them actual functions.

Overall, this class was a nice introduction to many things. Not only was I introduced to android app development, but I also learned about the many other projects my peers with higher motivation accomplished. It always amazes me to see how much power coding can have, you just need the patience to convert real life goals into code. I just hope the computer courses I took over last 4 years prepare me for UT's electrical engineering.

It's been a while...

Although this is our senior year, and senioritis is taking a heavy toll on our performance we've still managed to work on our app. We managed to find out how to change the background images of the buttons, which we're still going to keep a secret for now (we're building up the suspense until presentation day). We also stepped away from the code for a while and messed with the layout design page which doesn't change the java at all. While doing this we found the setting for the app's icon title. We edited this, and now whenever this app is downloaded on a phone or tablet, the app will be labeled as "LASA 2013 TTT". That reminds me - the tablets have been our biggest concern for the past couple of weeks. Everytime we want to use them, they happen to be dead. Whether its our own fault or if there's another group who uses them, its very annoying. Our next step will be adding the difficulties levels and hopefully my next blogpost will be about my great successes.

Next Steps

Our project right now has become pretty stale and there's not a whole lot we can do to continue to work on it. So we pretty much have three options in the future. The first is that we make another tic tac toe app but with two player functionality. We could do this by overwriting our original program but we would have to save ALL the files someplace else. Second, we could start with scratch and make another app, probably another simple game some as connect four. This would be a bit trickier but it would give us something fresh to work on. Finally, we could do something totally else than Android. There are quite a few options available to us and we'll just have to see if we want to continue on with Android.

The App can Talk!

This post covers what happened for the Feb. 17th week. That week was primarily focused on adding sounds to the program. This has been on our wait list for things to do for a long time having been held up by the previously faulty computer moves. The sounds wasn't really a challenge at all, it was just picking a short enough mp3 file. We searched for songs we though to be appropriate for the given situation (ex: Hall of Fame when the player wins). However, we had some controversially annoying lengthy clips like oppan gangam style and "hello motto" which didn't really impress our audience when we presented what we had. Instead the changes music in our app which we did over over a day stood out more than the flawless computer moves which we did for over months.

Y U NO HERE ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

Contrary to the quite harsh title of this blogpost, I'm really happy that Mr. Stephens got the LASA teacher of the year award. It makes complete sense as he's taking responsibility for nearly all the tech classes. The computer science department has improved drastically over the past couple of years. As for this week, Mr. Stephens hasn't been here for most, or the entire week (I wasn't here on Monday). I've heard Mr. Stephens now has work to do as in writing essays because of his accomplishment so good luck to him. I would think he'll be here starting from next week.

Two Minds are Greater than One

This week we had the privileged to have both our mentors here at once so theoretically we should have accomplished a lot. We're still pretty stuck on making the "new board" concept work out. We also had a code review one of the days which took up a significant portion of class time. Here my code review partner suggested to our group that instead of making an entirely new board where we would check the move, we could work it out simply with storing values in integers. If this were to work, it would prevent the confusion and messy work of copying and making this virtual identical board. I was then absent on Wednesday since I was sick. So sick in fact that I went home early, skipping tennis practice the previous day. To make things better it was a double-B day so I'm hoping next week I'll be in the class more often.

Graduate Assistance

I'm glad to realize that graduates from austin are coming in to help us with our project. They're using their own time to guide us through our android development which is quite encouraging. This past week we had another guider who graduated from UT Austin. He was a turing scholar, which is a prestigious title to have in the computer science department. This pretty much means he's a very skilled programmer and having him help us seemed just a bit excessive, but definitely worth it. We were finally able to tell why the game would stop before there was a real winner. He noticed that whether it be X's or O's, the game would stop when there were three of any in any order. This means that our program doesn't know how to differentiate between the two in some instance. Finding which instance this occurs in is the hard part because some times it works and other's it doesn't. We also came with a small-fix solution, in which we would get the computer to play atleast 5 moves before it stops, because every tic-tac-toe game requires atleast 6 moves for there to be a victor. But we quickly learned that it wouldn't actually solve the problem as the wrong winner would still be displayed after the 5 required moves and there's bound to be an error for forcing a game that wants to stop to go further.