Another year has (almost) passed, and as with the previous years I’ll keep up the tradition of publishing a final posting before heading into 2014. From a personal point-of-view, 2013 wasn’t thad bad (though still far from perfect) like some of the years before. I still earn my money as a sofware developer using delphi and love my job, and recently I even bought the house I’ve been spending most of my 32 years in (though there is still a bit of renovation to be done, but the house itself is in a good shape).
As far as my personal programming stuff goes, those of you that follow my blog may have (hopefully) noticed that I moved away from Delphi and went over to Java, mainly because of mobile development for Android devices. I’ve been wanting to develop for smartphones and tablets for some time and the move was easier than I expected. It didn’t take long to get a gripe of the Java syntax, and together with Eclipse I’m pouring out lines of code like never before. The more I work with Java (and Eclipse), the more I realize how far behind Delphi has fallen. It’s sad to see that Embarcadero seems to focus on the wrong areas of Delphi, and instead of fixing their base and giving the community a free Delphi version they hold onto stuff like FireMonkey and decided to release a new Delphi version every 6 months. Though quick release cycles can be good, I don’t think they’re suited for such an expensive development tool. But well, if you take a look around the hobbyist community you’ll quickly notice that nobody cares about Delphi anymore. Especially for OpenGL development, people either moved to Lazarus and/or Free Pascal or (like me) moved over to another programming language. The sad thing about this is that communites I’ve used to be active an have gotten pretty quit over the past few years.
And no posting without any programming stuff! Since I’m totally not into that christmas and holiday stuff I had plenty of time for coding during the recent days, and so I decided to do something gaming / OpenGL related for Android. And therefore I ported the random dungeon generator I described in this article over to Java, and though it’s still in it’s very early stages, you can already walk around randomly generated dungeons on a mobile device.
This is my first Java project that uses several different techniques. It’s based on OpenGL ES 2.0, uses different shaders for e.g. per-pixel lighting (which makes for easy flickering torches), a texture loader, a (yet simple) touchbased OpenGL GUI and much more. I don’t know if I’ll make it into a complete game, but I want to at least release a techdemo. I’ve got plenty of ideas and want to make heavy use of gestures for e.g. solving puzzles, making attacks, etc. I’m also not sure about the setting yet and still swaying between a more common theme (medieval, like the Eye of the Beholder-Series), something in the future (maybe a trapped cyborg in a futuristic factory) or something dark, psychologic and eerie in the vein of Trugbild. Maybe I’ll even open-source it ;)
And thus ends 2013, may 2014 bring forth more Android-related stuff (as long as Cthulhu won’t wake up from it’s eternal slumber 
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In addition to wishing all of my readers and friends a happy and healthy 2014 I’d like to dedicate this posting to a very special person that’s going through a hard time, seing that makes me pretty sad and it’s even harder not knowing how to really help :(