2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my
N-dimensional
Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the
issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the
user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.
Anyway, I did a little
research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and
Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a
Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my
computers had one already. I used
GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer.
GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.
Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a
Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long
forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on
Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose
in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I
can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a
comparison list of implementations and tried the ones
that support javax.bluetooth.
None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried
bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use
that address.
And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...
java bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote 2006 Nov 19, 9:25I've had a few thoughts recently on
Polytope Tetris. Constructive thoughts:
- One dimensional view. It should be easy to just hack up the two dimensional view.
- Cross sectional view. I want to have a view that displays cross sections of the game space taken across one dimension all in a row. It'd be nice if this cross sectional view could use any other
view to display each cross section, however I don't think the game's arch easily allows for that. Instead I may have to make it specific to the three dimensional view
Deconstructive thoughts:
- I went to the site the other day and saw that the project had an activity rating in the 90s. And this is while its still marked as Beta. I think I'm going to re-release the exact same bits
under a new name and move it out of Beta or Alpha. I'll call it Platinum Edition.
- There are a number of issues with this whole project. I'm trying to get my thoughts down here.
project polytopetetris 2003 Mar 1, 5:22Today will produce the Mardi Gras parade in my town. I haven't been the previous two years, but I'm considering it this time around. San Luis Obispo, as a college town, contains many teens and young
adults who enjoy occasional festivities accompanied with inebriation. San Luis Obispo, as relatively cheap beach front or at least near beach property, contains many vacationing elderly. As we all
know, voting increases proportionally with age and, as such, any person under the age of thirty in public after dark is arrested. Mardi Gras is yet another of the bouts in the battle between the
Youngsters and the Old-timers in the SLO ring. I will be very happy when this quarter is over. Chemistry may yet have a happy ending, but I don't know that Technical Writing can. I don't believe any
grade in that class would make me think, "I'm glad I spent all those weekends working on that report". The quarter's end will also mean I can devote some time to my attention starved
Polytope Tetris project. As a side note, I was tempted to, yet again, not write in the journal on account of my poor attitude tonight. However, a journal
of one entry does seems a bit slim.
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