AnacondaNet (pre-alpha test)

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

The game i have been working on for about a month is now getting to a stage where it is “play-able” and i would like to know if it works on the majority (all?) systems.

The basic game game is about 1 Meg and only contains low quality graphics for the background.

An optional high-quality graphics pack is available Also about a meg. It is a little more involved process to install these graphics (and about 300 meg of diskspace).

For obvious reasons :slight_smile: i recommend the graphics pack as it makes the game look more professional.

I have tested the game on 5 different computers (all varying chipset, graphics etc) however all running windows XP. Can someone try it on a Mac?

If at all possible i would like to test the multiplayer support so if you have a LAN can you see if the game play is non-laggy or not too jerky?

It is possible to have multiple instances of the game on one computer. I have had the server and 4 instances on the screen at once and it seemed to work fine (albiet with less frame rate)

IMPORTANT: as it is very much alpha it is not very user friendly so do read the ReadMe!

The game can be downloaded here:
http://www.geocities.com/budgetanime/anacondanet.html

I do have some questions if anyone can help me:

  • loading only a portion of a Jpeg image… the high quality graphics uses a background image 6400x4800 pixels and it causes memory issues if i try to load the entire image. Currently i am manually converting the jpg to a bmp and then converting that bmp to my own graphics format which is a seekable block based format where each block is a direct BufferedImage’s underlying array copy. This way i very quickley load in the blocks of the background as needed when scrolling.

The downside of this system is that there is a HUGE diskspace requirement. I would prefer to use the jpeg itself and load blocks from the jpeg as needed.

  • At least one tester seems to have issues with the networking, with a stacktrace provided indicating that there is something the request for joining a multi-cast group giving an SocketException stating “java.net.SocketException: error setting options”… any ideas on what might be causing this and how to rectify it?

If you do test it please let me know what your system is, frame rate, what background method used, number of players, tested in a Lan environment (worked or not).

example

Comp: Athlon XP 2100
Video: Radeon9700Pro
Java: 1.4.3
Frame rate: 60 fps
Number of players: 2
LAN Test: yes - worked well

#2

Are we supposed to convert the jpgs to bmps ourselves? I didn’t see any option in the installer to do it and it fails on not finding background4.bmp or something like that. I may have just misunderstood something in the readme, but I couldn’t get it to work.

#3

oops! yes, i at the moment you need to manually convert them to bmps…

Which is why i would like to be able to only load a portion of the jpeg… :confused:

#4

Its a little too much like hard work at the moment to test. :frowning:

Kev

#5

hehe no problem. :wink:

It does not need the graphics pack to run… you need only choose one of the other background options in the config.xml file.

#6

a java web start version would really help, not too hard to make, and would be much easier for every one to test it. At the moment its a long hassle to get the game running.

#7

lol, it is not ready for web start as it uses a config xml file at the moment. You will need to tailor it to your local computer.

This is a very early version, i just want to see if there is any problems at the moment so i do not go too far ahead and thus require more effort to “fix” problems.

I take it no one has any ideas on loading blocks from a Jpeg?

#8

It’s simple - most people won’t bother to run it until you bother to make a webstart, demo/test/alpha or no.

You could try uploading it to JGF (see link below) which will automatically make a webstart JNLP for you and set it all up and host it - and if anything goes wrong, then tell me because I’ll want to fix it ASAP anyway…

#9

I doubt there is any jpg loaders that will allow you to only load a portion of the image. So unless you write your own jpg decoder, you can forget it. Not sure it is even possible. I don’t know how the jpg decoder works. But I suspect you have to keep much of the image in memory as it will reuse part of the image for the compression.

What you need to do is break the jpg up yourself, then distribute the game with a bunch of broken up jpgs. That way it will load in java without running out of memory. Why haven’t you done this before?

#10

blahblahblahh: I will try uploading it to the automatic webstart creator tomorrow… (11 hours from this post time). I have zero experience with webstart as i pefer standalone downloads due to my narrow band (28.8k modem). how can i let people modify/get access to the config.xml if it is made webstart-able?

tom: i basically only just found a java image library which can read blocks from bmp and pngs, and so i have had not had time to see whether there is any significant savings (and whether there is no dramatic increase in loading times) when using many jpeg images as blocks of the background. These blocks are usuall 32x20 pixels so i am not sure whether jpeg will work well on these small images. I will be testing this out later.

#11

[quote] blahblahblahh: I will try uploading it to the automatic webstart creator tomorrow… (11 hours from this post time). I have zero experience with webstart as i pefer standalone downloads due to my narrow band (28.8k modem). how can i let people modify/get access to the config.xml if it is made webstart-able?
[/quote]
You probably won;t like this, unless you were smart and accessed your config the way you always should - through an indirector - because you’re going to have to use Muffins (search on these forums). You will also need to provide an interface for people to edit the settings, i.e. you’ll have to write a GUI that edits the muffins.

A modern client-side app simply should not be using a config.xml, I’m afraid. If you look around, almost no games do it. It’s extremely user-unfriendly.

Not that I’m complaining, just commiserating … but also pointing out that at the same time it’s not really tenable to be distribuing a game that requires a user-edited text file yuk!.

Although … if your config file contains a hard-code reference to C:\ or something, then I have no pity for you I’m afraid :stuck_out_tongue:

#12

wouldnt it be better to build your background out of small tiles to create a tile map?
as you could create as big a map as you liked then and the image file for the tiles would be a LOT smaller than a huge bitmap, and even the map data would be a fraction of the size too!

just a thought.

Even if you created 3 or even 4 512x512 tilemaps to give you lots of variations etc in the tiles, it would be simple to grab the relevant tile from whichever map its on etc.

HTH’s

#13

Whats a muffin? i guess i will have to read up on it.

the final version of the game will not need the user to edit the xml file. Once the menu system works the xml file will be generated from the options set by the user. The user will never have to access file xml config file. I am not sure how using a gui and xml will be user unfriendly…

There is no hard coded paths in the xml file, it only holds the user settings such as resolution, fullscreen mode, server ip and port info, etc

#14

I am adverse to using tile maps in this instance for a reason.

Back in 2003 my friends and i had found the mini-game “Anaconda” in the console game “Time Splitters Two” it was a up-to-four-player snake game in which the snakes are fully directional and had the extra feature of a speed boost key. We have had hours of fun playing the game.

In 2004 one of my friends suggested that it would be great if the game was multiplayer so that we could play it at LANs. The germ of a game was planted then.

So now i have had some free time to create a game of it. I am planning to debut it at Valhalla (www.valhalla.net.au) a largish LAN party which i attend and am an admin in. I plan to use it in a “fun” competition where the winner is the last snake standing (slithering) so i plan to have about 64 players in the game. For this to work i need a large arena, thus the 6400x4800. Since it is for a fun competition i plan to use photographs of local Lan personalities as the background. These photographs do not well suit being made up of tiles.

</runs out of film>

To sum up… i have not really planned to make the game accessable online other than through a downloadable archive… My target audience is my friends and the attendees of Valhalla.

Making the game accessable online is an added bonus.

I will probably be making a version which does not use stored settings so that it is easily made into a webstartable game for the purposes of testing.

#15

blahblahblah: i cannot seem to open http://javagamesfactory.org/ i tried googling for the site thinking that it is an incorrect url, however all the links that google provided were the same and i could not open the site.

#16

Sorry - that’s the major problem I’m trying to fix at the moment; too many visitors in a short space of time triggers bugs in Sun’s JVM and it runs out of memry and crashes. Nothing wrong per se with my code, just the JVM, but I have to workaround it somehow.

EDIT: so try again now. Every few days (or more often, depending on num hits) it crashes with out of memory error, and as soon as I notice I restart. Also, this weekend I’ll be trying various patches to see if they fix it, so might restart a few times then.

#17

ah :slight_smile:

i can access it right now. However i am in the process of making it more web-start friendly so i should try and have it ready by the end of sunday to upload and automatically create a jnlp file.