What's actually working and another update.

Ok, looking back on my three posts I haven't said anything about what my program does yet, so here it goes. So far the program opens and enters full screen, draws some text on screen and all you can do is exit. A bit useless really considering how long I've been working on the program and I'm annoyed at myself for being so slow.

At the moment I am working on the options menu which will allow me to change the resolution and enter and exit full screen mode. To do this I want to create one class that will open or create a 'ini' file which will contain all the default settings for the game (also the class will handle any arguments passed to the program at start).

Open University

Just thought I would chuck my a quick note. I'm studding towards a degree with the Open University and got my latest result back. I got ninety five percent, so go me.

Package And Class Info

My chosen development method is 'keep coding until something sticks', so my source code is currently a big mess even though the application doesn't do a lot yet. I have written absolutely no documentation for the program (unless, of course, this post counts).

I've divided the program into four packages. The main package is called LexDanceDance which contains everything else. The only class inside the package is the main class which starts the program.

The first package inside LexDanceDance is called ‘Objects’. This package contains classes that represent on screen objects. At the moment there are three classes in the package. The first is 'ScreenItem' which holds all the basic information about screen items (such as their screen position). ScreenItem is a abstract class (even though I've left the construction methods as public not protected - which is stupid).

I have two other classes. One is used to represent text on screen and it's called 'TextItem'. The final class is going to be used to represent a menu but it is not finished yet. This class is called 'OptionListItem'.

The second package is called 'controller'. It will contain all the classes that deal with the input devices. At the moment it only contains one class called 'KeyboardControlClass' and it deals with keyboard input, obviously.

The final package is called ‘Graphics’ and deals with all the on-screen stuff. There are two classes here. The first is called ‘screen’ (which actually doesn't do anything and will be removed eventually); the second, and last, class is called ‘DancePanel’ which overwrites the JPanel class and deals with all the on-screen stuff.

While it does not appear that I have got very far I believe I have reached a point where I can start to play with harder stuff. My first challenge is to get full-screen mode working. After this I intend to set up a double-buffer and then I can start on getting the dance mat input working.

Intentions

As this is my first post I am going to try and outline what I'm going to write about in this blog. A while ago I got into playing dance mat games. Not realising there were ones freely available already for the PC, I decided to write one for myself.

My first step was to buy a cheap Dance: UK XL dance mat off of eBay. Once this arrived I posted a thread on the official Java development forums asking a couple of basic questions.

If your interested in the thread: here.

My next post will outline the basic class structure of my program so far.