Cotopia GO .. on mobiles near you soon!

We've been quietly working on our next multiplayer title: Cotopia GO
I've been doing some testing lately and I must say that the game looks pretty good. We're currently checking out the latest builds on mobile phones and if all goes well we'll be in beta within a few days. We'll be then depending on the support of our community to give us constructive feedback on bugs/issues etc.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ondrej Michalcak for doing a great job writing this game for us - given how much we pay him he really must be doing it mostly for the love of a good challenge :)

Thank you Ondro and happy B-Day.

Darkstar plugin for NetBeans Updated

I've finally found some time on the train during my daily commute (usually spent sleeping) to implement one of the features I've had on the top of the TODO list ever since the plugin was originally published

Debugging Support

This little feature allows launching the PDS application in debug mode and then automatically attaches the NetBeans debugger.

I've realized that a better approach to the whole project may be to implement Project Darkstar Server as a platform, but I haven't been able to find a good tutorial on how to implement a custom platform. I guess I'll be taking the Java SE platform implementation as a starting point and go from there.

JDWP (wtf?) analyzer in the Open (Source)

During my years with Sun Microsystems I've worked on a number of projects. One of the responsibilities I've held was ensuring that the NetBeans debugger works well with J2ME emulators (WTK, Nokia, Sony Erisson etc.)

This was no small feat given that I've had to analyze the source of a given debugging problem, this could be:

• JDI implementation
• NetBeans debugger
• Emulator (most of the time not supplied by Sun)

and then negotiate with the responsible team(s) to fix the problem (sometimes fixing it myself and supplying a patch). This job would have been a pain if it wasn't for a small command line utility that Martin Ryzl (then my team leader, later my manager, now still someone I very much respect) wrote to monitor the JDWP traffic, when the job was his. Since the job was now mine, I took the utility and expanded it to a full blown GUI tool that can monitor JDWP packets and show detailed information about their contents and inter-relationships.

This was about 4-5 years ago, since then NetBeans including Mobility support went open source and with it most of my code, except for this last piece of work. With a blessing from Martin I am open sourcing it on java.net. It saved me a lot of time analyzing problems and hopefully it will make someone else's life easier as well.

Uninstall IntelliJ plugins on OS X

This is something that wasted nearly an hour of my time today and Google was of little help :(

At work we use IntelliJ and I am running OS X. I've installed the SVNbar plugin using the plugin browser in Idea. I restarted the IDE as asked but it would no longer come up - splash screen just hang there indefinetly.

Fine, I thought, lets just uninstall the plugin and I'll be fine.
Not so easy.
I couldn't find the plugin jars location on my harddrive (how ridiculous). It turns out that plugins go into:

USER_HOME/Library/Application Support/IntelliJIDEA70

which I found by pure stroke of luck.

Mean while the documentation reffers to:
USER_HOME/.IntelliJIdea70/
which doesn't exist.

On that note - NetBeans 6.5 Beta is out. Oh NetBeans, how I love thee...

Some minor points & updates

Since the release of the J2ME client API for Poject Darkstar I've had 36 downloads of the plugin from the NetBeans plugin portal alone. Given that the target audience for this effort is a very small I think that this is quite a success. Too bad I can't cont the number of downloads from the plugin homepage.

Off topic warning!!!

In other news I've been lately listening to a number of podcasts and if you are interested in Sci-Fi but lack the time to read then checking out some of these podcasts may just do the trick for you, it did for me :)

• http://www.variantfrequencies.com/
  
• http://escapepod.org/

There are also a large number of books available from http://www.podiobooks.com/ but not all of them are a good quality read. While I took time to listen to many of them (at least partially) I found these to be excellent:

• Grey by Jon Armstrong, not only an excellent audio book but also one of the very best books I've ever read, period.
  
• Singularity by Bill DeSmedt
• The Failed Cities Monologues by Matt Wallace
• The Rookie by Scott Sigler, while Scott is a legend his work is not for everyone (being action oriented rather than deep and though provoking)
  

Why am I on about pod books? Because they help get me through my day and are FREE - and that's always worth sharing.

Darkstar J2ME API released by Cotopia

So here we go some Good News,

1)
As Promised I've implemented the Darkstar Client API for J2ME. It took about 16 hours end to end + some testing and documentation time but all in all not too big of a job. I've released the binary as well as sources so that anyone can have a go at making improvements, bug fixing and finishing unimplemented functionality :)
Take a look here for the zips (bin, src, javadoc)

2)
In addition to the sockets implemetation I've put together an HTTP based iplementation which connects to Darkstar through a web based proxy. This way of connecting is (obviously) a bit more clunky but at times one has no other option, due to device or service limitations. This functionality is available in source from SVN as well as NetBeans plugins.

3)
Further more I've put together a Darkstar plugin for NetBeans that lets you manage server instances and server applications via IDE UI (nodes, buttons, dialogs etc.) rather than typing stuff into a shell :) This plugin basically lets you define a Darkstar server instance and then you can use that to run/stop your applications.

I did spend a bit of time on this work in the past few months so I hope that the community will take the code, test it out it and post fixes - or at least bug reports :)

Ballshot re-released, sources available

So I've finally pushed myself to fix-up and rebuild Ballshot for the latest server platform and we've released the game recently. Ballshot is a mobile clone of Puzzle Bobble

I have to say that working on this particular game has been one of the best times I've had while programming. It was one of the few times I've had to use a bit of math in real-world programming. It wasn't very complicated math at that, linear equations are taught in grade school if I recall correctly :) Also the extensive use of recursion and fiddling with bit masks etc. to calculate if 3 or more balls of same color are connected has been hours of .. errr .. fun ? :)

Sources for the game are available (without the networking functionality - single-player mode only) here:
BallShotGame.zip.
You can modify the sources/graphics, build the game, and play your own creation. I've donated the game sources as a part of NetBeans Mobility tutorial on device fragmentation that I helped put together.

If you are interested in doing mobile Java development then downloading NetBeans and going through the tutorials is an excellent start.

Mobile URLs in Japan

I have read article about mobile URLs and how they use them in Japan. I recommend you to read it.

It looks like, that in Japan, they solved problem which every mobile startup is solving and that is what kind of url they should use for their project.

For Cotopia, we choose to use www.cotopia.com for web version and cotopia.mobi for mobile version of the site.

There is no problem with our web url, but we had a lot of arguing about our mobile URL.

Other possibilities were using old wap.cotopia.com, which we used from 2003 to 2007 or new schema, which is starting to be adopted by big USA internet sites like Facebook or Google, which is m.domain.com, in our case it would be m.cotopia.com.

We decided, that wap domain is not good anymore. People generally don't like wap and there is not "cool" effect in wap anymore.

So our "fight" was whether to use m.cotopia.com or cotopia.mobi.

.mobi was just starting and I was thinking that it makes total sense to use it. It looked like, that .mobi initiative will try to help all .mobi startups and they will push it hard. For some reasons, this process is much slower than I was thinking it would be. Today, still nobody knows, what .mobi domain is. If I tell somebody to go to cotopia.mobi , they usually ask me if they should write www in front of it.

From this perspective, I think .mobi domain is good for projects, which have no .com domain.
If your website have www.domain.com, put your mobile version to m.domain.com. It's cheaper and easier to explain.

Or you may try the Japanese approach from the article and let me know how it goes.

Cotopia open sources Project Darkstar client API for JavaME

I've done it again :) After some time of development I've decided to open source another of my brilliant endeavors:

Project Darkstar client API for JavaME together with a Darkstar management console (as a NetBeans plugin)

The project contains everything you need to take advantage of Project Darkstar in your MIDlets:

1. Web project template which serves as an HTTP proxy for a Project Darkstar client application

2. Mobile project template with all code required to connect to the Web proxy implements the Java ME HTTP based Project Darkstar API

3. A NetBeans based Project Darkstar server instance management console (under Tools-> Darkstar server menu) that enables user to start and stop server application instances without any need to mess around with command line

4. (Planned/not yet there) Java ME socket based Project Darkstar API will be available soon

All of this good stuff is packaged for NetBeans 6+ only. If you don't have NetBeans installed then stop being a loser and go get it. You have no business doing Java ME development without it anyway! :)

To give it a try download the sources from:
https://darkstarmobile.dev.java.net/

I'll answer questions via email, tutorial is comming soon.

Our google ratings - pretty good I'd say :)

Check this out - Cotopia is on the first page if you Google for:

multiplayer mobile games

and it's on the second page if you search for:

mobile multiplayer games

given our marketing budget of $50 a year I'd say that Tomas is doing pretty good job promoting us. Now only if we could make it to number #1 for both search terms, we may have to double our budget :)

Adding Go to our portfolio is something we will do pretty soon to achieve this goal. Our little poll (on the right side of this page) indicates that Go is the next thing players want and as always (well... nearly always) what players want players get.