New level delector and more

I have some free time this week to keep working on Tower Commander. Thanks to my testers, I now have a list with at least 20 issues. The most tricky problems are the white screen bug due to text message interruption and the sound engine.

For the first one, I know the reason is that the OpenGL context gets lost if you switch to another application. But I think I have already handled that problem. I used to have white screen problem if switch out the application by pressing the home button and then switch back in. But it seems the problem is solved in this case. I don't know why text message will cause me trouble.

As for the sound engine, I finally found a good way to code it yesterday. However after I assigned sound effects to the gun towers, things got mad. Too many sound streams are mixed at the same time, and it is hard to hear clearly the gunshot but some noise. I have to figure out a way to organize the sound effects.

During the past few hours, I have added an exit menu activated when you press the back button. This menu kills the game activity. Before, the only way to switch out the game is through the home button, which doesn't really kills the game but "minimize" it. This may draw a lot of battery power. In speaking of battery life, I don't like the architectural design of the Android platform. There is no way to completely kill the application when it exists. Some parts of the program always run in the system. Like for example, after you finish an activity and rerun it, you will see what you allocated in the C++ code is still there.

To save more power, I also slowed down the frame rate and cleaned up some logic. As for the UI, now the Level Selector can show some details about each level.