It’s been over a month since my last update, and for that I apologize. I’ve been working hard getting the combat system stable and robust and I’ve made great progress in that area. There’s not much to show at this stage, but stay tuned for a walk-through of combat in the next week or two.

Anyway, I wanted to post an update just so it’s clear I’m still area and also to point out something interesting I discovered: C2DM (aka the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework) has been deprecated, in favour of GCM (aka Google Cloud Messaging for Android).

Now this news is pretty meaningless for most users, but for developers it’s great! C2DM was a bit of a hassle and it had a number of limitations that made it difficult to use. But the benefits of GCM are clear:

• No quotas (C2DM had a per-day quota and requesting more was a pain). When you think about it, a quota is kind of pointless anyway because spamming users is not very useful since they’ll just uninstall your app anyway.
• Larger payloads – up to 4KB, which lets us put more context into the notification
• Structured requests (instead of just plain text). This isn’t that big of a deal, since we used to format data as JSON and the “structured” format of GCM is also JSON, but it’s nice that it’s now natively supported

Unfortunately, it means another day or so lost as I migrate all of my code from C2DM to GCM. But it’ll be worth it!