Errr…what? 
Paradox 
Alrighty then, it’s now officially open.
The forum link points to last year’s contest.
Which forum link? :persecutioncomplex:
So, no applications?
Applets only, sorry.
Ok, I’m fine with that.
Furiously reading through the official Java tutorials on applets
Speaking of Applets…
How would you know if the template used is actually playable within Macs that only accept JRE 1.5? Is there a official Applet template that covers it all yet?
Not that it matters, but it would be nice if people knew exactly how many people can run the game.
Java4k just wants it runnable as an applet, but if you use jnlp you can write it as an application but run it as an applet. The plugin’s been able to run jnlp applets since sometime way back in 1.6
Why applets only?
because its almost as easy as starting a flash game.
When everything is set up propperly.
It’s a user convenience mostly. The webstart method is a utterly bad way to get people to play small web based games, all sorts of dialogs, system tray icons, window tabs it doesn’t recognize because webstart isn’t that common.
Webstart may work for some type of applications, but IMHO webstart should just be killed off as a technology because it’s horrible. Webstart was only created because they couldn’t figure out how to make applets not suck, and I’ve not seen anyone create a very successful webstart-only application.
Not that I think applets are super great either, my browser hangs like back in 1998 when loading an applet, even if it got 8 cores, 16 gig ram and a SSD.
Besides, if you go to a game web site where you can play small games, users EXPECT the games to be embedded in the web page and playable from there, flash has set the standard and user expectations. Using webstart is like smacking the users in their face with a wrench.
Besides besides, it doesn’t look like applets-only is an obstacle for 4k game developers.
I’ve changed the rules to make it more fair, Apo’s games must be 2K, and no pack200 for him either ;D Nah, just kidding.
There’s bunchload of games submitted into the contest already, and I’m trying not to flood the main page too fast. I think this year is going to surpass 100 games, only 6 days since the contest opened and already 25 games submitted, most from Apo and he isn’t even done making games 
I’m even starting to work on my own little 4k game, hurray!
Good to see you make a game yourself 
And someone tell zeroone he has competition…
I’m curious. How many bytes of source code is 4kB of game?
Actually, that depends on how you write the code, but it is anywhere 20KB or less (if you are using the bare-bone classes.) It is all about how you structure the code. I wouldn’t be surprised if you can get 30K code can be compressed to 4KB size.
The bytes of source code does not matter, it does not reflect on the compressed-end-game package size.
I encourage people to write good structured code, comment a lot, use long descriptive variable names. The obfuscators and compressors will strip everything down to their bare bone anyway. You gain nothing by writing cryptic unreadable one-liners that you believe takes up less space than it actually does, I’ve tried that before, took something like 40KB of source code and made it 20KB by making it less readable, and it actually increased the size of the final jar.
You inferred a lot. All source code metrics don’t mean much. But obviously if someone wanted a such a measure they would want a representation of the organic version of the code, not the obfuscated version. Otherwise they may as well just consult the size of the compiled version.
My three previous entries are respectively 29315 bytes, 37178 bytes, and 48059 bytes of source code. The main length difference is probably in the encoding of data, because \uxxxx is quite long…