Do you think 2D platform games are dead?

[pepe]

@CommanderKeith

I’m wrong, sorry. I never actually used rotate, I was just regurgitating what I read somewhere… but on trying it you’re right. And yes scaling is fine, I never said otherwise.

Alpha bitmasking & blending is terrible though. Even on state-of-the-art computers the I get <20FPS, on old computers the FPS is <5. But then when using full screen mode with 16bit pixel depth alpha blending flies - must be because there’s no need to convert 16bit to 32bit pixel depth - but how is someone new to java2D meant to know this? I only found out about it recently from reading Chet & Chris C’s blogs. Its stuff like this which makes J2D hard & seemingly delicate.

I am just saying that 2D rendering with Java2D isn’t super high performance. When I run my super-basic 2D game on a state of the art computer I should expect an FPS greater than 40 but so often that is not the case. Nevertheless I love J2D and think that low-ish performance is the price I have to pay to get my game running on any machine without (driver) problems.

Okay for scaling. Nevertheless, blending and rotating isn’t an issue, as far as i found. It depends on what you call a state-of-the-art computer, but i get generally 50 to 60fps drawing over 100 32 bits sprites, all scaled, some rotated, sometimes with global alpha applied, sometimes vector clipped, on a 1.8ghz P4 laptop. That is without any J2D flag applied.
To the opposite of your experience, going fullscreen actually slows down to 10fps. I didn’t investigate the reasons for that. Maybe i should.

I plan on making a second gamechmark that would be a complete platform game, à la mario with constantly scaled/rotated sprites. We’ll see what it gives.

[oNyx]

The stats are from alien flux (so they are a few years old) and they were automatically collected.

Well, 35% isnt that bad. Keep in mind that shareware games usually sell as many mac as windows copies (often even more). So, yea you lose 35% over at the windows side, but you get mac for free, which is a big plus.

If it would run everywhere you could like make 18% (pulled out of the arse guesstimate) more sells. The thing you have to ask yourself… is it really worth it? Additionally, if the drawing is slower, the minimum system requirements are higher, which will cost you some unknown amout of sells. You also simply cant do many things (would be too slow), which will make the look less nice… which will also cost you some sells.

So you have to decide for yourself, which is the lesser of both evils. Depending on installed drivers or higher system requirements + less effects + more time spend on art creation + more time spend at performance tweaks? (Making bitmasked stuff look acceptable is quite alot of extra work)

Well, I decided to go with the former. Finishing a game is already hard enough.

[Markus_Persson]

* Markus_Persson got Loco Roco today.

[fletchergames]

2D Platform games will never be completely dead. They might not be popular for a while, but they’ll always make a comeback. Retro games (e.g. Pacman) were quite the craze a few years back. Maybe 2D Platformers will be next.

[sloth]

The classics never die. I’d say most of us grew up on Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Coleco Vision etc, and I for one still enjoy playing old 2D platformers as well as new ones. The newer ones, being mostly freeware/shareware created by hobbyist developers and the sort, are usually either free or demo/full version. Im sure everyone already knows about Gametrove - http://www.gametrove.net and there’s a perfect example of some great platform games (as well as puzzle, rpg, strategy) made by independent developers that are able to pull in some revenue for their software. If something is fun/addictive enough people will have no problem paying a few dollars for a full version. The price range is $1-30+ so your $10 price is a reasonable price so long as the game is enjoyable. 8)