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#1

Well, if you guys don’t mind, would you mind testing out yet another Tetris-clone please?

URL: http://www.benyeoh.com/bentris2.htm

Thanks. :slight_smile:

EDIT: Changed the url.

Changes:

  • Skips rendering frames if it cannot meet the 60FPS goal. This will ensure the game is playable even with low FPS.

  • F3 toggles the FPS and UPS counter

  • Has a ‘turbo’ mode where the game tries to render and update as fast as it can

  • F1 to enable ‘turbo’, F2 disables it

Known bugs that I can’t fix and would appreciate any input on:

  • Slow performance upon startup of the game through Java Web Start when the game is just updated or downloaded. Running it off the command line gives consistent performance. Basically, it’s not HW accelerated the 1st time around when running off webstart

  • Mac display problems.

#2

Very, very nice. I love the FX, exspecially the transitions. and the block glow.

EDIT: does need some sound though

#3

Looks beautiful but it’s SO SLOW - whilst doing fancy effects in j2d is technically impressive (well, only mildly so if you can’t manage to do it at high speed) it’s a pity if it makes the game unplayable at the same time :frowning: (11 - 17 fps on a 1ghz PC with GF2…for reference, there was an opengl tetris some years ago with almost exactly the same effects - actually, slightly more fancy… it did extra stuff with explosions - that used to run at around 60 fps on my old 300Mhz PC using a 3D card).

Also, your keyboard handling is broken. It very often “dropped” keys, completely not noticing they’d been pressed. Maybe one in every four keypresses was completely ignored? Not only in the game, but also sometimes in the menus.

I don’t like the “delayed response” behaviour either, although this is a design issue not a technical one, e.g. I hit twice left, then twice right, and after I hit right the second time it would move left (because of the very very low responsiveness to KB input) before finally starting to move right … although it would often lose one or both of the right keypresses :(.

But all that aside it looks like being an excellent game eventually. I second the need for sound - but would also strongly suggest speeding things up a bit (maybe just using Blocked levels of ultra-high KB responsiveness would do to get rid of the feeling of treacle).

#4

PS that was with all special effects disabled.

PPS I spotted the comment on the webpage about windows acceleration; does this mean that even with all effects disabled you’re using something like translucency? That would explain very low frame rates…

#5

Well, I was going to post and say how much I liked this game, presentation is fantastic, polish is brilliant even for a simple tetris game it rocks.

However, on exit it blue screened my XP machine which hasn’t happened once in the 2 years I’ve owned it. Argh!

Kev

#6

Firstly, thanks for all the comments. :slight_smile:

[quote]Looks beautiful but it’s SO SLOW - whilst doing fancy effects in j2d is technically impressive (well, only mildly so if you can’t manage to do it at high speed) it’s a pity if it makes the game unplayable at the same time :frowning: (11 - 17 fps on a 1ghz PC with GF2…for reference, there was an opengl tetris some years ago with almost exactly the same effects - actually, slightly more fancy… it did extra stuff with explosions - that used to run at around 60 fps on my old 300Mhz PC using a 3D card).

Also, your keyboard handling is broken. It very often “dropped” keys, completely not noticing they’d been pressed. Maybe one in every four keypresses was completely ignored? Not only in the game, but also sometimes in the menus.

I don’t like the “delayed response” behaviour either, although this is a design issue not a technical one, e.g. I hit twice left, then twice right, and after I hit right the second time it would move left (because of the very very low responsiveness to KB input) before finally starting to move right … although it would often lose one or both of the right keypresses :(.

But all that aside it looks like being an excellent game eventually. I second the need for sound - but would also strongly suggest speeding things up a bit (maybe just using Blocked levels of ultra-high KB responsiveness would do to get rid of the feeling of treacle).
[/quote]
Yucks. 11-17FPS is horrible. The reason for the “treacle”-like feel is because the game is meant to run at a constant 60FPS (or 30FPS, when I finally implement that as an optional mode).

I had hoped to get 60FPS on a 1ghz P3 with 3D card with all effects turned on. Are you running on a Linux box by any chance? Even if you are, you shouldn’t be getting 11-17FPS all the time, with all the effects turned off.

The only thing that I can think off that’s mildly processor intensive are the metaball effects.

Wierd. I’m really not sure what’s wrong.

Btw, with all effects off, there are still portions of the game where translucency is used. Like when a row is formed, and when a player dies. I plan to add more options to turn them all off at a later date though.

Yeah, and sound is coming soon. Though right now, I’m more interested in getting the performance right. I don’t see a point adding sound if it’ll then take a 3.0ghz P4 to run properly at 60FPS…

Would you guys do me favor and post your system specs and the frame rates you’re getting? (The FPS can be seen within the actual game at the bottom left corner)

Thanks again :slight_smile:

#7

Runs at 63fps on my 3Ghz rig under 1.5beta3/60 :slight_smile: Very slick - need to make the menu screens responsive rather than forcing the user to wait for the fade effects to finish. Or at least, just speed up the fades to under half a second.

Cas :slight_smile:

#8

Nice looking game, with all effects I get 33fps when running winXP and 18fps running linux on the same machine. Specs 2.0ghz athlon, gf4, jre1.4.2_05.

And yes, the transitions and menus fellt slow.

#9

Looks excellent and so smooth. Very nice!
Runs perfectly on my machine (Winblows, AMD Xp, Radeon 9600).
Will play it with another player the next days and see how multiplayer works (which is the really interesting part in Tetris I think).

Many greetings to Asia!

PS: Kev, if a Java game causes a bluescreen it can’t be the Java game - it’s this Winblows with its silly drivers. Even on solid Winblows PCs you will get a bluescreen occasionally I’m afraid. I know you know this, so I just say it to comfort you. :slight_smile:

#10

I’ve replaced the game with a hacked version that has the option of turning off the game timer to get the maximum FPS achievable by your machine.

PRESS F1 TO TURN IT ON
PRESS F2 TO TURN IT OFF

Please post the max FPS that you get when you try the game out.

And bring on all the feedback. I’d love to hear what you think.

#11

Funny.

When I run my game off the command line on my harddrive, I get the expected 600 FPS average on my P4 3.0GHZ ATI 9800 PRO.

When I run my game off webstart, I get only 200 FPS average. What the hell?!? ???

This is with, of course, the same machine with the same tasks running in the background.

EDIT: I seem to have narrowed down the problem. Whenever the app is run for the first time off web start, or if any updating for the app is done by web start, the app slows to a crawl. However, for subsequent runs, it runs at normal speed. Can any of you confirm this too?

I’ll post the jar’ed app online and it’d help if you guys could check that out too and post your FPS scores comparisons.

EDIT: Jar is posted online. Both the web start and the online jar version has the “turbo” toggle.

#12

Yeah, sorry, blue screen just irritated me specially as its taken me this long to get my machine back up and running.

The game really is lovely.

Kev

#13

The dangers of using fancy effects on the menu and slowing your input routine. Twice I’ve fired it up. Twice I accidentally quit when I tried to start the game.

Note: it takes 10+ seconds from the moment the Bentris title starts building to the menu actually becoming active, by which time the user is bored. Worse, the menu items appear slowly (several seconds) so the user is ultra impatient. You should really make it so that any key press cancels the fancy (annoying) graphics and JUST LETS ME PLAY THE GAME.

The input sluggishness problems mean that I’d hit up and down to try and make something happen while waiting for the damn menu items to appear, then once they did I’d see it had hilighted what I wanted, and I hit enter. First time I thought it crashed. Second time I realised - it was only now VERY late processing the “down” keyevents, moving the cursor down, and then processing the “enter” keyevent and quitting the damn game >:(.

Will try again and be more cautious this time. Sigh…

EDIT: webstart link is http://web.powerwebbing.com/benyeoh/bentris2.jnlp

#14

I just counted 25 seconds from the start of the title appearing to the menu becoming usable. Sometimes the bricks spin in real fast, sometimes slow, sometimes start slow then speed up suddenly halfway through.

FPS during the game was 16 mostly, but near the start it went to 52/51/47 for a while. I’m pretty sure that was simply that it happened to not being using translucency for a short while. f1/f2 made no noticeable difference (no surprise there!)

#15

Ran great for me, looked very professional. In fact, one of the best “packaged” games I’ve seen in awhile. Had no problems with speed. WinXP, 2.5GHz

#16

The jar runs at 50 fps on my athlon 1.33 GHz with geforce 2 on WinXP
F2 runs at 200

#17

I’ve only tested the JAR-version on winXP, got a bit better frame rate, 41fps. Transistions and menus still fellt a bit slow though.

Oh and I got 200-250 fps with f2.

[quote] Nice looking game, with all effects I get 33fps when running winXP and 18fps running linux on the same machine. Specs 2.0ghz athlon, gf4, jre1.4.2_05.
[/quote]

#18

Well I don’t see any FPS indicator but the game runs beautifully on my:

2GHZ Win2K w/ Intel 82845G/GL card

The fades are a bit slow but the menu and game have none of the mentioned key response problems, it plays at exactly the speed I would like it to.

#19

Totally hosed on the Mac.

The fullscreen starts out correctly then shifts down to the right so that a significant chunk of the screen is not shown.

Other than that it appears like it would work.

This is the only fullscreen game that I have seen behave this way.

OS X 10.3.5 JRE 1.4.2_05 Update 1

#20

Ran between 18 and 40 fps on JRE1.4.2_05, Win2k, AMD 2400XP, GeForce4MX.

Looks cool and plays OK but I’d go along with there being too much waiting around for menus to load and FX to finish.

The only other problem was that some of the pieces won’t rotate at the edge of the playing field.