Better Pausing

The reason I was obsessing so much over behavior when you press Home, is I was afraid my app would be consuming so many resources while theoretically “closed”. It would be hanging onto a ton of memory from loaded bitmaps, music, data structures, etc. In addition, my original design would have the game loop continue to spinlock until the user resumed the game. This would drain battery and result in people getting all pissy.

I had wanted to use myThread.wait() and myThread.notify() in the beginning, but I couldn’t seem to get it to work right. It was only after I realized that calling myThread.wait() does not actually make myThread pause. It makes whatever thread you’re currently in pause. So the way to actually make my game loop pause is to make my main Activity set a pause flag in the game loop thread. Then the game loop will check that flag and pause itself with wait(). Then later on, you can do myThread.notify() to start the thread again and make the thread disable the pause flag immediately after waking up.