Donate

Friday, July 30, 2010

Money for a Server

We plan to add a save feature to The Elements soon. This would hopefully allow everyone to upload something like 3 saves for others to browse and load. However, currently our server is just a patched together laptop sitting in my (Gurtej's) basement. It is neither a dedicated server nor fast. Ideally we would like to buy a computer that we can use as a dedicated server. Unfortunately, we lack the funds. Thus, we are calling upon you to buy the Falling Sandpaper app (think of it as a donate version of our app with a free gift!) and donate through the button here in our blog to raise the money we need. Once we get enough money together, hopefully we can find a decent server and buy it, or at least rent space in one. Please, help us out so that we can continue to improve this app!

Monday, July 12, 2010

Falling Sand Live Wallpaper

A few of you may have noticed that recently, we released a second application to the market called "Falling Sand Live Wallpaper." It is essentially a live wallpaper of our application, "The Elements."

There are a few known bugs.
-It does not work on the official 2.2 update for the Nexus One.
-When tested on a custom 2.2 Nexus One ROM, it caused slowdown on the phone. This did not happen on 2.1 Droid.

We hope you will purchase this app to support us!

-IDKJava Team

Update 4.0 / 4.1

Recently, we released two updates to our application, 4.00 and 4.10.

4.00 Added custom elements, fixed an explosion bug ( which in turn caused another bug), and added mud.

4.10 Was primarily bug fixes, the specifics of which can be found on the Google Code Site.

-IDKJava Team

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Open Source!

Both Gurtej and I are huge opensource supporters. We both use Ubuntu Linux as our main OS on our computer, and use Android on our phones. We proud to say that as of yesterday, our project, The Elements, has been opensourced! You can now find the project here, on Google Code. This means that now everyone can see and use the code we have written for The Elements. The only thing we ask is that if you port it to a closed system (iPhone, Windows), please make the application a paid app. On open systems (Android, Linux), please make it a free app. Thanks!

If you want to contribute, there are a few things that we need. First off, if someone who is knowledgeable in C/Java wants to help make our code neater and more organized we definitely need that. There are a number of tasks that I have in mind if any other programmers want to help as well. If you are skilled in art, we need someone to make a better icon, buttons for the main menu, an eraser button for the UI, and a better background for loading screen and main page.

If you're not skilled in programming or art, we also have a few things there as well. The most useful thing is reporting bugs, and testing. When you report bugs, try to post the exact steps to follow to reproduce the bug if possible. Bugs with vague descriptions such as: "It crashes sometimes when C4 is used" are not very helpful since they are hard to reproduce and determine exactly what is the problem. A better bug report would be: "When I place C4 on the bottom left edge of the screen in zoomed mode, and then place magma along the upper left edge, when the two react and the C4 explodes, the game crashes without a force close button." That allows us to look into the problem and place debug calls to find out what is happening.

Another thing we need is people to write out information for our game. We need people to fill the wiki, make a better help page for the game, and help translate the game. Anything else you can think of to help would be great as well!

-IDKJava Team