Monday, February 4, 2008

Classic Cypher Updated

Yesterday I posted an updated version of Classic Cypher to the Ultimate Retro Project's repository. The game play was overhauled to make it easier to understand what was happening and to streamline the input. The display speed was also sped up. I probably would have also started doing some work on the modern version yesterday, except I ran into problems yesterday which ate up some of the time that I allocated. I will explain how cypher works another day, today I want to go over the problem I had.

The Ultimate Retro Project is developed on multiple machines. My Mac is the predominant machine I do the work on, but occasionally use my Ubuntu machine. Unfortunately, when I started up eclipse on my Ubuntu machine yesterday, it wouldn't bring up the project or editor windows siting a very long Java exception as the cause. I had just installed some other software days earlier so figured that could be the problem. Uninstalling them didn't fix the problem. Then I remembered that I had a similar problem on Windows when the default version of Java was set to an older version of Java by a program. That was solved by simply installing a newer version of Java. As I had Java 6 already on Ubuntu, this wasn't an option. Ubuntu wouldn't let me uninstall it as some programs need it. I had to scour the Ubuntu online documentation in order to find instructions for setting the default version of Java to use. This required a command line command be used, which I have no problems with but a less experienced user might have. In Ubuntu's defense, this is the first time I have ever needed to use a terminal to get something working and typing in a command into a terminal window is vastly easier than navigating the Window's Registry, not to mention a lot safer.

Needless to say, changing the default Java back to 6 worked otherwise I wouldn't have gotten any UR work done. There simply are too many versions of Java floating around. While I like the Java programming language, problems like this should never happen.

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