The project is changing direction. I’m already ticked off and now I have to try to set up libGDX, our new graphics base. I expect things not to go well. Honestly, I’m not even hopeful.

It’s 0810 and I’m already frustrated just by the degrading things one suffers being an old man getting up in the orning and getting going. And, I might add, by the obvious decline in civility, democracy, and the world in general. And our joint project is changing direction, sort of. We’re already in a mode of each building a little something on our own and doing show and tell on Tuesday’s meeting of the Friday Night Coding Society Slash Zoom Ensemble, but now the central technology seems to have moved from TornadoFX to libGDX. It does seem that libGDX will be better for game stuff, which is kind of what we’re doing, but we no longer have a common core to build upon.

This means that I will have to set up my own IDEA / Kotlin / libGDX, which would be just fine were I not a complete naif about all three of those. So I anticipate the use of langauge which will only be able to be approximated or alluded to here in public.

I plan to keep as contemporaneous a log as I can, so as to record what I learn, and to record whatever mistakes I make, so that my betters can advise me, should they be willing to do so.

Here goes.

libGDX

It says here, on libgdx.com

ibGDX is a cross-platform Java game development framework based on OpenGL (ES) that works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, your browser and iOS.

And there’s a nice Get Started button. A few clicks lead me to their Set Up a Dev Env page.

On that page I find:

Since Gradle does not support JDK 18 yet, libGDX projects will not work with it either. As a consequence, you are advised to use JDK 8-17!

Wonderful. I don’t even know where and when I’ll get a chance to adjust that but I’ll see what I can do when I get somewhere. Right now my IDEA is sitting at the main startup page. For the record:

Fresh-Air:_2022_projects ron$ java --version
openjdk 18.0.2 2022-07-19
OpenJDK Runtime Environment Homebrew (build 18.0.2+0)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Homebrew (build 18.0.2+0, mixed mode, sharing)

I download the GDX setup jar. Naturally MacOS won’t let me run it because it is from an unknown developer. Supposedly I can run java in the command line to get it to go.

I drag the file into my prpjects top folder, since I can’t figure out what its name is in the download folder.

That lets me run the jar and opens the setup, which I configure like this:

config

I guess the next step is to set it loose.

It says:

Generating app in /Users/ron/Dropbox/_2022_projects/gdxone
Executing '/Users/ron/Dropbox/_2022_projects/gdxone/gradlew clean --no-daemon'
To honour the JVM settings for this build a single-use Daemon process will be forked. See https://docs.gradle.org/7.5/userguide/gradle_daemon.html#sec:disabling_the_daemon.
Daemon will be stopped at the end of the build 
> Task :core:clean UP-TO-DATE
> Task :desktop:clean UP-TO-DATE

Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it incompatible with Gradle 8.0.

You can use '--warning-mode all' to show the individual deprecation warnings and determine if they come from your own scripts or plugins.

See https://docs.gradle.org/7.5/userguide/command_line_interface.html#sec:command_line_warnings

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 2s
2 actionable tasks: 2 up-to-date
Done!
To import in Eclipse: File -> Import -> Gradle -> Existing Gradle Project
To import to Intellij IDEA: File -> Open -> build.gradle
To import to NetBeans: File -> Open Project...

OK so I am supposed to open the build.gradle, which I think we know cannot work because java version. Do it anyway.

As expected it says

gdxone: failed at 8/6/22, 8:37 AM 62ms

I can only guess that I need a different JDK version.

Bag it. I’m out. I don’t have time for this.