What a massive, massive headache.
I was asked by the Leap Motion crew if they could check out a standalone version of the VisualTouch Therapy app for their promotions team. You’d think that compiling a standalone player would be super simple, right? Especially from an IDE like Eclipse… or even Processing.
Of course it wasn’t. First off, I had massive problems with the compiler– rather than save out all the proper class in one directory, it would pull classes from unused JAVA utils so I had a package full of unnecessary classes. Then, it would fail to include pointers to the classes that the app actually does use, so my program would fail on launch.
In addition, I was not rally familiar with how the JAVA console shows errors (answer: it doesn’t!) so I was unable to find the source of the failure until I started running the app from the terminal.
Eventually, I got that sorted– but I wasted days checking to make sure that the problem was not with the audio libraries, or the OpenGL libraries, or even the Leap controller libraries. It was with the compiler, something I’ve used for bunches of other projects without any issue whatsoever… but of course none of those projects have as many dependencies as this one. Having to write my .plist file by hand kind of sucked as well.
There’s also something weird with how it loads art assets– sometimes it wants them to be loaded from the “data” folder in the package, but sometimes it wants to pull them from a “data” folder from outside the package. I still have to figure out why.
Regardless, I managed to put together a standalone app which runs fine (for a really rough alpha version) and got it to the Leap guys in time. Naturally, I have yet to hear back.