6. Presenting Breakout Extreme

Post date: Jan 03, 2014 4:5:47 AM

Breakout. Breakout Extreme has finally reached a point where I can move onto the next project, though I will definitely make a return to refine the games features, add more animation, and finally start to include actual graphics.

Breakout Extreme

My focus in regards to programming in Java. I have been more focused on ensuring collisions operate correctly, smooth mechanics, sound, and --- most importantly --- consistent performance on different computers. Even though I have been programming all my games with Java, and Java is especially noted for its platform independence, I started to get feedback that the games are running slower on certain computers. After some effort, I managed to "seemingly" resolve the problem by replacing swing Timer's with scheduled, cached threads from Java's ScheduledExecutorService and Executors packages. I say "seemingly" only because of the difficulty in debugging performance problems that only appear to exist on computers apart from what I use. The best way, or the only way rather, to discover performance problems is to get feedback or access to more computers different from mine. Moreover, I am also beginning to realize OS X security features demand more steps in order to deploy applications for OS X operating systems --- an issue that has recently caused me to take security and deployment more seriously.