Development Blog #5

Friday, April 12 2013

Today was a long, laborious day. Matt and I worked on a lot of bug fixes and polishing of the framework that we know works. I had to re-write the entire Sound engine today, as something was going on with Lightweight Java Game Library and OpenAL. Something about corrupted files inside the LWJGL libraries. I have no idea. So, Matt did some research and found that the Slick util libraries handle OpenAL on their own as well (as, I guess, Java supports .wav files out of the box on its own). It turns out, there was about half as much code needed in order to write the Sound engine using the Slick utils.

So we tested the Sound engine, and lo and behold, it worked flawlessly. We tested it with playing two sounds at once, and it handled that beautifully as well.

I also spent a lot of time re-writing the way we are reading in data from text files. Originally, there was an outer While loop and an inner For loop that handled the saving of data from a text file into actual objects. The problem was that the loop seemed to both reset itself and would never exit the loop (that one was purely my fault, as I never closed the BufferedReader after I was done using it). I ended up redoing the loops and using two While loops to get the job done. It is ugly and hacky, but hey, it works. I just now have to figure out how to exit a try-catch without throwing an exception (because the try portion completes successfully  but it still goes on to the catch due to a bug that I am trying to fix).