A Few Hours With LibGdx

So last night I had a couple of hours spare as the evening headed towards midnight.

To use up this time I started to port the rudimentary parts of a a game I had been working on with my CoffeeScript based engine over to Java and LibGdx. Well when I say port I really mean I just start writing it again. I did not actually look at the CoffeeScript code.

Initial impressions of libgdx are pretty good so far with the caveat that I have only really worked on it for a couple of hours. I got a little background map displayed and started to put sprites on the screen. Messed around with attempting to scale the sprites in a sensible way when the window changed size consumed a bit of time and I failed to make head way with that if I am honest.

I did not want to get bogged down so decided to just ignore it for now and use a screen size of 800 by 480. This coincidently is the resolution of my Nexus One. Having coded for an hour or two on the desktop I was very happy to see I could just change targets in eclipse and have it run on my phone. Nice!

Probably the only thing that made me a few exclamation marks appear above my head in true comic book style was that angle of sprites when draw time uses degrees rather than radians. I am so used to using radians that it feels wrong to use degrees. Not that it is wrong just different and made me think - libraries should not do that. I am sure many people prefer degrees as they are more used to them.

Other than that everything seems good. Googling specific problems usually results in others having hit the problems and then solution is presented. In my experience this is a good thing when it comes to using other people libraries.