TF2 Sentry - Page Work in Progress

Smartphone Application

The smartphone application is for the engineer's PDA. Instead of having a physical one, I thought why not get creative and have a PDA on the smartphone. It can help me refresh my java development and would be fun to learn bluetooth on the phone as well.

Design and Features
The design I felt would be straight forward. Based on the ingame PDA, I'll have the sentry icon, the health and ammo displayed. The upgrade and kill count will remain static, although I can always have a "kill" count just +1 everytime the sentry fires. Now in the game if the sentry sapped, the sapper icon is displayed to the engineer sliding out to the right. There is no room on the phone for this unless I make the sentry much more narrow, which didn't look right. Since I didn't have a dispenser or teleporter icon, I made the sapper icon come down instead of to the right. On the bottom is buttons for me during testing. I plan to redesign it. There's buttons to test the health and ammo animations, the sapping animation, and for the bluetooth connection (which I implemented). The test buttons will be removed as those commands will come from the STM, but I will replace them with refill health or refill ammo button, just to reset the variables. Below is a picture of it in game on the top right.
sentry front
Android Studio
I decide to use a tool called Android Studio. It's a nice tool that lets you simulate any phone on the computer, and lets you visualize the UI on the comptuer as well. (Although my PC has an AMD processor which apparently is a problem for the software where you can't simulate phones, so I have to directly connect my phone to the computer and flash the program to the phone when I want to test). It lets you choose between Java and Kotlin as well (I am using Java as I wrote above).
The App
Here is the LATEST photo of the app GUI as of 11/2021. It's color scheme has been updated, some icons added and improvements, and some function and debug changes. Videos will be updated. sentry front
Results
Note: Videos are a bit outdated but same functionality concept.
Below are some videos showing the app connecting through bluetooth, the Logcat from Android Studio during the bluetooth connection, and then a demonstration of some of the animations.
Back to Bluetooth System