Game compeition poll - version 2!

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#1

Sorry, everyone. I discovered two bugs in the poll system ;D. SWP’s comments come back to haunt me…

Anyway, I’ve learnt one thing for sure: Never modify a YABB poll once people have started voting - it goes to hell if you do.

So, if we need another set of options, I’ll just make a third poll ;).

PS: I’ve broken the polling system! Despite being the creator of this poll, I no longer have access to modify it in ANY way ;D.

PPS: I intended to allow multiple votes, but it seems the checkbox did the opposite of what it was supposed to !?! (I think it got confused because I modified two different polls in two different windows at the same time, and it’s uncovered a race-condition bug in the YABB poll CGI code. LOL).

PPPS: …or maybe I just have a magnet in my stomach :confused:

#2

To summarise from previous poll:

  • Most people reckon 4kb is way too small

  • Many people think 16kb is too small

  • Some people think 64kb is too small

  • Several people think a limit somewhere between 0.5Mb and 2Mb is about right (various different suggestions in that range)

  • Several people think a small limit, but discounting pre-agreed libraries (i.e. using “JOGL, LWJGL, …etc” doesn’t count towards your limit.

  • Unless quite a lot of people step forwards and say “yes, I will enter, and yes I intend to include sounds” we can assume most games will have no sound at all (partly because most people have trouble finding any, partly because sound in java is still so buggy). Personally, I’m inclined to assume all have no sound, and not encourage sounds for this particular competition (Which is intended to be EASY for people to enter) making a slightly more level playing field.

[NOTE: I’ve got a cunning plan for a future competitiion w.r.t. to sounds, so those of you who are itching to add funky sound tracks etc I promise there will be another opportunity in the future]

#3

As i wrote in the old thread, i prefer an app size of 1mb (jar file size ;D)

#4

Anything above 64k becomes a competition for who has the best artist helping them.

You can write a graphics heavy app. that fills 64k in a day or 2, where-as filling 64k with just code will take you weeks - if not longer.

A heavily optimised 4K app. is in the region of 1000 lines of code, extrapolate that up, and for 64k you are looking at 16000 lines of code =O

If expected development time is going to be longer than a month, I think you are going to have problems getting many serious entrants.

It all depends on whether you want this to be a game development competition, or a programming competition.
I prefer the latter.
Hence my vote is for a small size, somewhere between 4k and 16k.

#5

2mb is to much

“somewhere between 512 and 2048kb”

Well, the whole idea is to prevent people from doing too much filesize optimisations. 512kb is already quite enough for most stuff even if you include lwjgl. It’s less than 200kb if you use the latest webstart compression tricks. I wrote something about that here and I wrote quite alot php stuff for that purpose yesterday and so far it works pretty well (I just need to do some more tests for being sure).

because sound in java is still so buggy

Actually, sound was pretty ok. Right now (with 1.5) it’s completely broken.

#6

I don’t care how long it takes or what size the jar is, so long as the games MUST run on all three major platforms - Windows, Linux, and Mac (latest releases) with no exceptions.

That means use helper libs with native bindings (ODE, JOGL, LWJGL, JOAL, etc…) so long as they are available for the 3 platforms that people actually use… though it is debatable that a statistically significant number of people use something other than Windows :slight_smile:

I also don’t think there should be a size limit. It is too artificial. The time limit has more meaning as it stresses the rapid development that Java provides… if you are making a game in the real world (not a contest hack), you are far less concerned with size, well except for Cas :)…

I mean the limit in this case should be anything that is practical for web distribution, since that is how people will have to get the game. Other than that size is a mostly artificial limit that unnecessarily restricts creativity.

#7

Well, filesize is a concern for downloadable games, but there is no need for overdoing it. Using small lossy formats is good, using compression is sensible… but that’s about it. Once you start peeling bytes off by replacing all ifs with ?: it starts getting silly… or single class… everything done in static()… jasmin… et al. It’s just painfull and completely voids the productivity gain.

I wouldn’t say that it restricts creativity as such. Imo that’s just not the case. However, if you look at the lundumdare stuff… it’s usually pretty big, because there is just no time for caring about the filesize. Well, my whole point is that if there isn’t a too restrictive size limit, you won’t have to care about the size too much. That means that you can write it pretty fast and that you can optimize for speed (size and speed are usually oppositional).

Hm. I can understand Abuse’s concern about shifting it too much into the artistic corner. That could be kinda fixed by only allowing “programmer art” or to put it in other words it needs to be a single person project. But I guess that wouldn’t turn out that well.

64kb isn’t that huge either. That’s about the filesize of the current TinyRivers version. 12 classes (the game itself is a single class the rest is for support), 3 wavs (will be 5), 24 (tiny) images, 1 manifest.mf… :-/

A game like that could be stripped down to about 8kb if you throw everything out and create the gradients on startup, but that would be… uhm… pretty naked :>

#8

My slightly rethought ideas are -

  • Allow 2 person teams, but make it worthwhile to do it solo.
  • Don’t penalize for sound, just don’t reward for it.
  • Do like the cooks on Iron Chef and require everyone use the same graphic content or as much as they can. IE - provide 5 textures and see how it gets incorporated into the game.
  • Limit the size to around 500K +/- 250K. Size is considered the compiled program with resources, not the source code to produce it.
  • Time is more important than final product size, IMHO. Not less than a week to develop, but not more than 2.
  • Remember the coding comments.
  • I second swpalmer. The games must be tri-platform, no exceptions. (ok, how do you test if you don’t have a linux box?? Well, someone has to provide ‘beta’ testing if this is a hard and fast rule.)

Dr A>

#9

Size of code… eh were did you guys get idea from? Replacing ifs with ?: is for peeling some bytes of the class file :>

Remember the coding comments.

Huh ???

#10

Why bother with a file size limit anyway? If the competition’s short enough it’s going to be pretty difficult to make more than 2MB of classes and content as it is! Given a really tight deadline - say, 48hrs from the announcement of the game topic - you’ve got to throw together any and all libs you think will do the job and make a game out of it.

FYI, Super Elvis is 819KB excluding content and ecommerce… and the bit that isn’t LWJGL and SPGL was 95% written inside 160 hours. The rest of the time I’ve spent on it has been dreaming up whacky levels.

The content is 4.83MB, and that’s taken about 400 hours to produce so far.

The next game we’re going to write we are determined to take no more than 320 hours total on, and we’re also determined to make money out of it too! So bear that in mind when you’re wondering how much effort it’s acceptable to put in for a compo…

Cas :slight_smile:

#11

[quote]Size of code… eh were did you guys get idea from? Replacing ifs with ?: is for peeling some bytes of the class file :>

Remember the coding comments.

Huh ???
[/quote]
I meant, make sure that you stress commenting of the source code somehow. It won’t help anyone to show off this great game you did in 5 minutes, while blindfolded, with one hand behind your back, while SCUBA diving, if your source code is so twisted and confusing that having the source is worthless. :o

My understanding is that one of the goals is to allow others to see how you did things as well.

Dr. A>

#12

I meant, make sure that you stress commenting of the source code somehow.

Well, so far releasing the code has been an optional thingy.

And within the last 3 days I’ve only written 3 comments:
//this content type can be used for all versions
//save the status here if you like
//you could do something else here, like logging and/or bouncing it back to your usual 404 page

I just stopped writing weird code… y’know if you writing clean “every day” code, there is no need to point out much stuff.

Why bother with a file size limit anyway?

In order to prevent people from including a crappy 30min wav soundtrack and/or gigantic bitmaps drawn in mspaint :wink:

Therefore I said “non restricting size limit”. 512kb is alot of space and 2mb is a s-load. It’s just… I’ve already seen demo version of really bad shoot em ups which were about 130mb (due to GIGANTIC bmp background images [single image per level] plus lot’s of ultra long cd quality wavs).

Well, I kinda agree… but 48h is indeed tight. A bit too much stress if you ask me and there is also no way to put that into some spare time scattered across several days.

#13

How about a soft limit?

i.e. “If your game is going to go over 1Mb you need to check with us first, and explain roughly why it’s that size”.

For instance, I remember a CFXWeb graphics comp once where 9 entries were under 750kb, and the tenth was over 7.5Mb (!). It turned out that the tenth was crap but had a nice MP3 background music. Dumb voters made it the winner, but I’m sure most of the other entrants must have felt ripped off (“why did I bother trying to make a good graphical demo when I could have just done any old **** and added a kick-ass soundtrack?”).

PS Perhaps the soft limit ought to be closer to 5Mb, say.

#14

The soft limit sounds mostly ok.

blah3 - Check the old poll for a request of the demo stuff you did.

Dr. A>

#15

Why not put togheter a media library that the participants must use? That way it won’t be a competition about who got most art capable friends :smiley:

#16

If it’ll save any hassle feel free to use the sound effects from Alien Flux and Super Elvis (they’re in OGG format) - all sorts of bleeps and bloops and zaps and stuff in there. Even if all the games sound the same it’s better than silence!

Cas :slight_smile:

#17

[quote]If it’ll save any hassle feel free to use the sound effects from Alien Flux and Super Elvis (they’re in OGG format) - all sorts of bleeps and bloops and zaps and stuff in there. Even if all the games sound the same it’s better than silence!

Cas :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Are they all under some form of free license already? (I know about the source, but I wasn’t sure about the media).

That sounds like a fantastic offer, either way. Perhaps add a link to where people can download them? (not everyone knows where to get them. Yet ;))

#18

They’re all mine. And I say that entrants can use them in their entries!

Grab 'em by installing Super Elvis and Alien Flux :wink: “Donations” to the Alien Flux In Peril Fund gratefully received ::):stuck_out_tongue:

The sounds are decompressed from OGG to SPGL jgwave format in the user’s home directory. jgwave format is almost raw - just a tiny header. See http://www.sf.net/projects/spgl, browse the cvs for com.shavenpuppy.jglib.Wave

Cas :slight_smile:

#19

[quote]Why not put togheter a media library that the participants must use?
[/quote]
That is a great idea. A collection of 2D sprites, textures, simple 3dmodels even, and source effects that everyone can use will let people concentrate on “the game” and the coding.
Any other graphics can be generated algorithmicly (simple shapes, gradients, fractal landscapes, etc.) as needed.

Many thanks Cas, for offering your sound effects.

#20

Yep, but doing that properly is going to take some time, and will be even better if I can bend the ears of some media-library owners - there’s a couple who I think would go for the free publicity and grant a small subset of their libs for use in a competition …but thats a bit too ambitious for a first competition. I want a chance to shake out any teething problems first ;).

It’s great to see Cas offering his sound effects for this, but for graphics I don’t think it’s much to ask that for now people supply their own - there’s a huge wealth of sprites, and non-free stuff that if you ask nicely people will let you use for a one-off (which is how we got the Survivor model :)). There’s also a lot of free textures on the net, and free modelling programs.

I’d love to see a contest where it was focussed right down to ONLY your game-design, coding skills, and gameplay - but it’s going to be pretty good just to have a short competition to kick it off, don’t you think?