None of the judges managed to run my game. The rules should be clear about which JRE is used… the one from the JDK (with soundbank) or the standalone (without soundbank).
Without a soundbank (midi) the only way to create sounds is to generate em on the fly (as seen in defender4k).
excellent point oNyx… it’s a shame you were at a disadvantage due to a strange circumstance with the soundbank. personally I think the game was underrated since compatibility was unstable (because I, for one, am all about action shooters).
this is one issue I’ll open to public debate. I personally feel it should be acceptable as long as you specify that you need a soundbank. This way I can provide a download link for a soundbank in your game’s description after you submit it. The reason I want to be flexible with this is because MIDI is pretty much the only way to play sounds without generating them at runtime or loading AU/WAV files (which obviously wont fit into 4K).
Who agrees with allowing a soundbank download if needed?
Ok with me, although I feel that the game should be coded to work without sound if no soundbank is present, rather than fail with an untrapped exception (null pointer probably). I reckon you can get basic midi sound effects in around 200 to 250 compressed bytes, while more like 800 are required to synthesise your own with the sampled sound API. There’s also Toolkit.beep() in the bargain basement at around 30 compressed bytes, although this gives the ‘error’ sound, which is a bit distracting.
Soundbanks are an extension to the “standard JRE”, I don’t think they should be allowed. Otherwise, I’d like to use Java3D cause its only an extension
Kev
In that case sound shouldn’t be included during judging criteria. If we went by the judging criteria of last year someone could make a ‘really nice looking tetris’ ( : again) and spend alot of bytes on synthesizeing music and sweep the contest.
I’m in favor of providing a soundbank. Unlike java3d a midi soundbank isn’t an additional api…
i’m in favor of a soundbank too, sure its an extension but its probably the only way to get some decent sound into the 4k games. Games without sound sometimes just don’t feel right.
[quote=“swpalmer,post:98,topic:25185”]
You seem to miss the point that the competition is about the ENTRIES, not about the JUDGES.
Count me out this year.
Pardon my language, but this sound bank stuff if absolute tosh…
Sure, someone could do that. If they got a highscore due to wasting the whole 4k on sounds then the judgeing criteria is indeed screwed. I seem to remember last year sound gave a couple of extra points, nothing more.
because its hard to get sound in 4k doesn’t mean we should just change the limit. Adding a sound bank is an extra download for the user (given that game players don’t normally get the whole JDK). Hence, its no longer a 4k download.
If the topic had been kept quiet competitors could have got away with support soundbanks if present. That way on the judges machines they were likely to get nice sound.
Having additional resources over the 4k + JRE is cheating no matter whether its an API, Soundbank or tonne of additional levels downloadable from a seperate site.
Kev
the soundbank download is very small 0.35mb, my view is if most of the people who are gonna try the 4k games are developers they’ll most probably have the jdk anyway, besides its a very small trade off for better quality and more impressive games, its not like the 4k game limit is changing, games will still have to be 4096bytes, just gives developers another api to play with. Of course having other api’s is different, only reason i think this should pass is soundless 4k games just aren’t as fun as ones with sound.
[quote]Having additional resources over the 4k + JRE is cheating no matter whether its an API, Soundbank or tonne of additional levels downloadable from a seperate site.
[/quote]
its only cheating if its against the rules, which can always be changed 
[quote=“Markus_Persson,post:107,topic:25185”]
Funny, that’s exactly the point that I think you are missing
Oh, well. I’m not judging this year anyway.
I’m torn on the soundbank issue. I don’t like it because I think the target should be the standard JRE as it is typically installed on end-user’s systems. But I think it’s unfortunate that the standard JRE is crippled in that regard so it seems like adding the sound bank is a reasonable compromise.
I guess I will abstain. I don’t want to vote against the inclusion of the soundbank, but I’m not for it enough to give a vote.
[futile hope]If we convince Sun to include it in a point release of 1.5, the issue is irrelevant :)[/futile hope]
I vote for no soundbank, i cant be bothered to download it, so why should any other players.
If you have the JDK installed you already have a soundbank.
but i have the 1.4 jdk and the 1.5 jre.
I would like to use the soundbank. The Midi API is part of the standard JRE. You still have to be clever and make sound tradeoffs to balance the game play graphics and sound. Just getting a handle to a MidiChannel will cost a few hundred bytes. I think part of the fun is discovering new areas in the JRE that you would not normally use in day to day work. But of course any failure in loading the sound bank should be handled and should not stop the game from running.
[quote=“Rick,post:116,topic:25185”]
Let me get this straight, having never coded MIDI sound…
Are you saying that the sound API is included but is completely unusable because there are no sounds (“instuments”) for it to play?
If so, what would be the point of sun including the MIDI related classes inthe JRE at all?
If this is NOT true, and the instruments are just limited to a smaller set or something, then I vote no sound bank. Deal with the restricted environment, as it exists for the bulk of the user base.
If it IS true, somebody slap Sun for me
The applet getAudioClip() and others work in web browsers so far as I know (ie I haven’t tested it myself). These were made static to be usable all over.
[quote=“Markus_Persson,post:107,topic:25185”]
:’(
don’t think it needs a sound “instument” to run midi, here on linux i have no hardware/software midi support but java runs the midi fine, i think it may have a built in midi instument emulator or something.
[quote=“swpalmer,post:117,topic:25185”]
I believe the intention is that you can package your own midi synthesizer with your app.