Feedback request : Jack Flowers !

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#1

Dear all,

I’m pleased to introduce my new game “Jack Flowers” : A platformer, inspired by Bomb Jack and many other old games I used to play…

here’s the link http://www.javapause.com/games/jack

Your goal as Jack (a mutant beetle) is to collect flowers through levels of increasing difficulty, avoiding ferocious bees and spiders !

This game features :

  • [b]Xith3D with the new JOGL-JSR231 support[b].
  • [b]JOGLAppletLauncher ! [b] yes, the game is an applet (a heavy one : 3 to 6 megs depending on Java1.5 or 1.4.2 (thanks to pack200)
  • online scoring !
  • 2D action in a 3D environment

And it’s also a soft release for my new web site JavaPause.com (I’m planning to add new small games every month).

I’ve added an FPS counter to the applet, and I’d like to hear from you about your rendering speed and computer configuration.

And most of all, do you like the game ? (and if not… why ?)

Best regards,

Lilian

#2

Didn’t notice a FPS counter… but found the animation was not ‘fluid’ .

edit: found it… 10.0fps :frowning: that’s just showing the title screen. Tried to start a game a second time (entirely new visit to the page) and when I clicked to play it faded to black and sat there forever.

You usually fall off the leaf if it is sloping upward in the direction you walk. In some cases controls seemed to be not as responsive as I would have liked, e.g. jumping then jumping again when you hit the next leaf doesn’t work… I usualy land on the next leaf and fall off it instead of taking that second jump.

Game concept is nice… improved animation (fps?) will go a long way.

#3

Software rendering fallback ? I’ve got 250 fps here ! (laptop) 340 fps on my PIV, and 120 on my mac mini !

I’ve noticed it worked faster with IE than with Firefox/Mozilla on XP (like a sub-vsync) … don’t know why yet.

Thanks for testing !

Lilian

#4

between 120-200 fps on amd 1.6 radeon x800

Bug : game stop (computer hang) each 10-15 secondes for 2-3 secondes. I have already seen this bug lot of times in other java-ogl binded applets I do not know where it come from but it append in most of opengl applets with ATI video cards (at least radeon 7500 and radeon x800).

The game looks good.

Bruno

#5

around 100fps here, I managed it to level 4, then I wanted to retry, but it then took ages for the “black screen” to dissapear and it ran only with 10fps on level 2, level 1 ran ok.

Amd Athlon 2200+
Radeon 9000

Nice game btw :), there seemed to be a graphics error in level 4 (or was that level 3 - dunno) i would have posted a screen shot, but I wasn’t able to reach it again, because of the above problems.

EDIT: Here’s a screen shot with that error of level 2

#6

Tried it on an Athlon64 3000+/X800pro/Firefox 1.5/WinXP system. Worked fine but quite slow (around 22fps) compared to what others got.

#7

could you try with IE please ?

Lilian

#8

Tried on Mac this time…

I get on the bottom of the applet window:

“Error : Native library libjogl.jnilib isn’t properly signed or has other errors”

#9

err… could you try the jogl official demo and tell me if it works ?

https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/applettest.html

Lilian

#10

Sure. I’m getting around 350fps in IE… ???

#11

Great game!
Contrary to other posts here I found the game to run super smooth on my system; ~360fps
This was on a P4 2.8Ghz, GeforceFX 6800, WinXP, Firefox 1.5, JVM 1.5.0_06

I really like the game, maybe it could be spiced up a little by adding things like bouncing leaves, destroyable enemey’s etc?
The only downside might be that it’s a bit hefty download for non-broadband users…

Thijs

PS: I think this would be the first applet game to utilize JOGL isn’t it?

#12

Thanks !

Yes, it’s still beta and I’ll add many improvements during the coming week…

I’ll also work on the download weight with a special 56k version (midi music especially instead of 2 megs of samples and ogg).

And yes, it’s the first JOGL applet game… as the co-author of JOGLAppletLauncher, I wanted to showcase it fast !

Lilian

#13

same here : 27 fps with FF, 340 with IE (but sames fps on the laptop !!)

Lilian

#14

Fun game :slight_smile:
Spec: Athlon 2200+, GF6200.
20fps in firefox
160fps in IE

When quitting the game i got a humming sound in my speakers that doesnt go away until I reboot or turn off wave output.

#15

Fixed some bugs (second time play is now at correct speed) and improved initialization experience (no more ‘freezing’).

Lilian

#16

It’s official, the JOGL applet stuff is hosed for Mac. (OS X 10.4.4, Safari Version 2.0.3 (417.8), Java 5 latest DP)

#17

Nice and fun game c_lilian! Platformers are always fun for me! :slight_smile:

The game ran slowly on my side. 33.3 fps on Firefox and between 33 and 35 in IE. What’s weird is that the game seems to run significantly faster in IE (for example the hero moves and jumps about 2 times faster in IE). Here are my machine specs:

GeForce 2 MX 32 megs
Athlon 1.4G
512 megs of RAM
Window XP sp2

When running in Firefox, I can do double jumps. I mean I can jump a second time while still in the air. I haven’t had this bug in IE but maybe it’s just because it runs faster so it prevents the bug to occur?

The game concept is great! About the improvements I’d rather have the hero falling down faster. In other words, the hore jump is a bit slow in my opinion. By comparaison I prefer the kind of jump speed like in Super Mario series on GBA. Notice the speed Mario falls down. The game action is much faster this way (sorry for my bad english sometimes). Also it seems that having the game in full screen would better immerse the player. I had the impression that I was too far from the scene. My windows resolution is 1280 x 1024.

Keep the good work! :slight_smile:

#18

Thanks for the feedback, I don’t know why the moves are different : it’s all based on delta times (nanoTimer on java5, interpolated millis on 1.4) and so should behave the same (speed wise) at 10 or 300 fps…

About the double jumps… it might be related, I’ll improve the engine this week to correct this (I’m also going to add “jumping” leaves for double or triple height jumps).

About screen size… I’ll try and tweak the applet settings to resize it with the browser, but I’m not sure about the results… I’ve sized the screen to allow full visibility of the levels.

Thanks again !

Lilian

#19

I made it now several times to level 4, without it getting this low fps.
It’s extremely addicting!!!

#20

[quote]About screen size… I’ll try and tweak the applet settings to resize it with the browser, but I’m not sure about the results… I’ve sized the screen to allow full visibility of the levels.
[/quote]
Why not converting the game in a desktop one and running it in fullscreen? Do you run it in an applet only for deployment/download size issues?

Also, do you use advertising to finance your game dev? If so, does it help significantly?