I know it's a little late, but better late than never, I suppose.

I got steps and distance to work reliably last week! In the nick of time, too, since I presented on Monday.

​My steps algorithm picks up false positives, sometimes, but most pedometers aren't entirely accurate, so I'm willing to call it good enough. Distance is calculated based on steps, so running on a treadmill will still qualify as "covering ground" even though you're stationary.

​I presented on Monday, and I think it went over pretty well! Mine was a little less formal than Dino's and Alex's, but not too informal. People laughed at my jokes, which was more than I expected, honestly. I felt bad that I couldn't answer Zach's question at the time--I looked into it, and my app is currently at a little over 4MB.

​I'm going to take it easy the next few days. I will be putting the finishing touches on this weekend.

Hello everyone! It's Easter Weekend, and I spontaneously flew out to Portland for a gaming convention called BetaCon. It's the first time they've ever held it, and they brought in a couple representatives from big companies out on the West coast (Sony, Ubisoft, Insomniac, etc), so I got to do a bit of networking. I also got to try out the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. The Rift was very cool, and the Vive gave me a headache.

App wise, I got my Inventory page done, as well as my Shop page, and the window that allows you to use items during a quest. I've tested all of them except the experience potion (and at this point in the game, I might take it out entirely. Demos really snuck up on me!). Right now, the pages all have a list of the items in the form of buttons that, when clicked, open up a window that contains the name of the item, its description, a picture of it, and the quantity that you have. Shop contains buttons that allow you to buy items, and the in-quest inventory screen has buttons that allow you to use them.

I need to implement back buttons throughout my app. Right now, the back navigation at the bottom of an android phone is the only way to backtrack. Also, I'd like to get the quest screen to come back automatically after an item is used.

I still need to get my health statistics in so that I can test it for real. I think I'm going to focus on getting distance in first, and then all the others, then steps, since that one seems to be fighting me the most. 

​Wish me luck!

Since I've had no success with the pedometer and other health statistics (I might just give in and pull it off the Fitbit), I've put my energy into putting together my inventory tab. Initially, I was going to do a master/detail flow, but that didn't work out, so I tried doing an expandable list. That was giving me odd errors, so I scrapped that as well, and got to where I am now: essentially, a list of buttons.

All the buttons are labeled with the name of the item, and if you click it, it opens a pop-up window with the name, description, and image of the item. I will add the quantity owned this week, as well as implement the shop function to be similar.

I think, for doing the in-quest effects, I might set a boolean for certain ones and use it when you're on the quest screen. That's the plan at least, and you know what they say about the best laid plans.

After about an hour of playing with all of the source code for the pedometer, my app did that thing that it did a few weeks ago where it decides to just completely give up. So, I transfered all of the things I had before that I know worked (essentially everything without the pedometer) and transferred it into a new app.   Since the original code I was working with was 12 different .java files (yikes!) I switched to looking at a new one. This one is from Google, so hopefully it'll be a bit easier to understand.

Other than that, I've just been working on some tiny bug fixes. My experience bar wasn't updating right once it was filled past 50% on level 2, and past 25% on level 3, and so on. Turns out I was loading the progression on the bar before I was loading the maximum, so that was throwing it off. I also had an issue where the leveling up doesn't go through right away, so you'd have an experience bar filled to 100%. Then the next fight would put you at 0% for the next level. Again, it was an issue of putting things in the wrong order.

My job just shifted to their summer hours, so now I'll be working Tuesday and Thursday nights. This leeches away a little bit of my free time (at max, eight hours a week), but hopefully still having Mondays and Wednesday nights free will let me have enough time in which to work.

I will admit, I haven't gotten a lot done this week. I took a vacation--the mountains in Oregon are nice at this time of year.

Anyway, trying to track steps with the built-in pedometer didn't work. Not sure if it was an issue with refreshing the page, storing the data, getting the data, or what--I just know that despite a lap around the Ian's apartment the step counter didn't change. So, I'm scrapping that all together and I'm gonna measure all step data with the accelerometer. 

I downloaded the source code for an app called Pedometer (bonus points for creativity!) that measures steps, distance, calories burned, and active minutes (what a coincidence) a while ago. I looked it over a bit this week and I'm working on picking out the parts I need and tossing the parts I don't. Ideally, by the end of this week I would like the pedometer up and running, and (hopefully) updating the data it needs to (energy & the step display). Best case scenario, I'll have something to show for walkthroughs this week.

That's it for now. Hope you all enjoyed your break!

Tuesday night, I was working on my app and doing my thing. Suddenly, when I run it, it crashes on startup. When I look through the debugger, it tells me I'm assigning a float to an int, and that I'm missing a resource.  

A peek into my resource file tells me that significantly more than that has gone awry. Errors are printing at a horrifying speed--half the document is underlined in red. I panic for a few minutes, then scoot all my code into a fresh app. It compiles without a problem. And lo, HealthQuest 2 was born.

Beyond that, I haven't had many issues this week. I've been balancing my time between fiddling with the Settings option. I ended up completely re-doing it, since the automatic layout it provided for me was a pretty big mystery I wasn't too interested in figuring out. It now contains six buttons (and a cool graphic!):

• Rename Yourself: Pretty obvious, but allows you to change the name displayed on the Main screen and the Questing screen.
• Turn on/off Notifications: Haven't figured out how I'm gonna swing this one. I think it'll be one of the things I work on later.
• Set Daily Challenge: I did figure out how I'm gonna do this, but I haven't done it yet. It's going to have a drop-down menu with all the different statistics (distance, steps, active minutes, and kcals burned) and then a number input field. So you'd select your stat, then the number in that stat. For instance, selecting "distance" and "10" would make your daily goal to walk ten miles. This will support decimals too (hopefully), for those who don't want to walk a mile every day. ;)
• Clear Daily Step Average: Again, pretty obvious, but it lets you clear your average daily steps. Just in case someone tanked it one day and messed up their average.
• Clear Daily Distance Average: Does exactly the same thing as above, but clears distance instead.
• Clear Account: Wipes out everything. Pressing "Clear Account" allows you to start fresh and will redirect you to the "Naming" screen, where you pick a name and are provided with the starting Main Page. You will have to pick a new character, and your old data will not be recoverable.

The buttons that clear data have a popup that asks if you're sure you wanna delete things, so hopefully it doesn't happen by accident. 

Beyond settings, I made some new monsters to fight in Quest mode (four hour plane rides are good for getting work done!). There are nine, now, and right now, it's set so that every level gives you a new monster. I'd like to fix it so that every quest you go into has the chance of giving you one of the five previous monsters (except a couple key mini-bosses), so there is a little variety and you aren't fighting the same thing a bunch of times in a row.

So that's what I've got so far! Hopefully I'll get another update sometime this week about how the pedometer works (Ian hasn't surrendered his phone to me yet :c) and let y'all know!

So, remember that post I made a few hours ago where I mentioned not being able to get my local files to work? Turns out, you just need to stay up until 1:30 AM and suddenly everything makes sense and your code works perfectly!

...Just kidding. If only, right?

Anyway, I scrapped the local file idea completely. Instead, the app just stores data with the app; no file writing necessary. I used something called a Shared Preference (which I'd heard of before, but when I looked at it with my "normal-daylight-hours" eyes, it didn't make any sense), which creates a kind of "global" variable within your app that survives the app being closed. So, now my app launches and asks for your name, and then uses it throughout the app. If you re-launch the app after entering your name, HealthQuest remembers you, and it doesn't ask you to re-enter your name.

Tomorrow I will work on getting the rest of the data to do the same. For now, I'm going to get some rest.

Til next time!

Unfortunately, I haven't made much headway this week. I've been struggling with internal storage--there's so many ways to do it! I think what I have now can write to a file just fine, but I have no way of checking to see if it already exists, so I think I might be overwriting it every time.

I will have a more thorough post when I figure it out later this week. 

But really. No one I know has a phone that actually has a pedometer in it. Most smart phones nowadays use the accelerometer combined with gravity to calculate steps.

Anyway, this week I've mostly been doing little things. I'm a little behind in one of my classes (oops) so I've been playing catch up this week. App wise, I've added a little bit of functionality. I've hard-coded the starting number of "energy points" to five, and every time a quest is started an energy point is deducted. Damage has been randomized, and completing a quest will give you 10 experience and a random number of coins relative to your level. When your experience exceeds the amount you need to level up, the experience bar resets and doubles the required amount of experience to level up. It also updates the level display.

I've also added a bit of code that is supposed to work as a step counter as long as your phone has a pedometer built in. Since mine doesn't, and no one that a) I'm comfortable asking for favors and b) lives within 100 miles of me has a phone that does, I can't test that until I get my hands on a phone with a pedometer during spring break. But in the meantime, I've found some source code for an app called Pedometer (how original!) that counts steps, distance, active minutes, and kcals burned daily. I'll be looking over that and work on getting some actual functionality in this app. 

​Til next time!