I’m going to do this in the easiest way I can think of. For anything more complicated, an NME extension would probably work well for this sort of thing!
After starting a new NME project in FlashDevelop, I created MainActivity.java in the project directory:
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As part of an experiment I was working on, I needed to decide how an object should turn based on what it saw. Some objects would attract it, and some it would prefer to turn away from.
Turns out that’s more complicated than I expected.
So I pulled that portion out to test in an interactive example.
I’m not dissatisfied with the result, but it remains to be seen how it will work out in the larger experiment. For example, the algorithm seems overly complex. There are a whole bunch of Math.sin, Math.cos, and Math.atan2 calls. I don’t know how slow or fast these really are (I should check), but I wonder how it will fare as the number of objects increases. It’s possible that I tend to worry about that sort of thing too much: future cost.
NME is a great solution for writing applications for the Android platform, but sometimes it’s nice to escape the confines of GameActivity.java. This is fairly easy to do, but unfortunately until now it meant writing Java.
Which is fine for some people, but given the option I’d avoid it. (For one thing, it’s lead me to using two separate editors simultaneously: FlashDevelop and Notepad++.)
The convenience of using NME, along with the power and freedom that comes from using Java for Android, without ever having to leave HaXe, is one of the benefits of HaXe’s upcoming Java target. And for me, it’s a pretty major one.
There are three main steps. The first is writing the code, and the other two are the two-stage compilation process. I imagine most of the stuff I discuss will end up being automated nicely, but for now this is how I went about it.
I made a simple SMS relay for my android (Andrew) last night. In case you want to do something similar, good news I’m about to explain its code!
Note: I used NME and notepad++ and flashdevelop and java, instead of NME and haXe, or Eclipse and Java. This might strike you as strange. It probably is strange, but it’s easier and more comfortable for me. The code shown will mostly be java and XML, which should match up nicely if you’re using Eclipse and Java, and you can take a look at Programming for android in Java but using NME if you’re using NME.
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I really like Haxe and NME, but someday I might want to try something that it’s default templates may not be well suited for.
NME’s main activity is defined by GameActivity.java, which is cool, but in some cases you may want to specify your own activity rather than creating an NME extension. This is something that you can totally do!
Depending on how you go about it, many of the haxe and nme libraries may no longer be safe to use. If your activity extends org.haxe.nme.GameActivity, I assume everything should be fine. If it skips it entirely on its way to android.app.Activity, I’d probably write the rest of my code in Java — just in case. I’m not really sure how the compiled c++/ndk stuff works and is tied in, with the exception of some JNI calls.
So as you know, I recently released an Android game. (It now has like 10 downloads, just saying.. #prettyproudofthat)
Javi got a chance to play it, and kindly offered to make some background music. Ten short minutes later, I had an MP3.
The music began by fading in, after which it could be looped as long as playback started at 5336ms on each subsequent play. Looking at the API documentation for nme.media.Sound, and nme.media.SoundChannel, this seemed fine. Turns out, that was not the case. But Javi had made this music for me, so what choice did I have but to make it work?
In case I decide to make further changes to NME, this is how to do it:
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After a few days of working on that simple game I mentioned earlier, and after much deliberation, sighing, and staring at the wall, I decided to try for a release package for android — which I found almost as confusing as I had feared.
Dear future-self, It is possible and this is how you once went about it:
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I’ve spent the last few days playing around with haXe and nme consumed by the dream of maybe one day compiling to both android and flash.
There have been more than a few issues, but so far I’ve struggled past or through most of them. I wish, though, that I’d written them down, especially since the internet repeatedly failed to present me with solutions.
My motives, however, are primarily selfish in nature. I mean maybe someone, somewhere, may encounter the same issues I did. Honestly though, I know I’ll forget these things within minutes and spend such time searching through old code trying to discover what I’d done. Such alarming, frustrating time.
So if anything comes up during the remainder of today (and possibly tomorrow), I intend to post it here.
Right here.
(A few lines further down.)
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