Here’s a new Java 3D Game: World Espiritu.
It’s written in Java / Java 3D, and can take input from Direct X compatible controllers.
It runs on Win XP - you need a good video card to run it.
It has a downloadable demo version.
Check it out.
Worked just fine at high settings, 1280 by 1024, on a 2 ghz (I think your 3 ghz+ estimate is a bit high?) computer with 1 gb RAM and a 6600GT video card. Some parts were smoother than others but it worked fine in general.
That said… that is one interesting game you have there. I played through the tutorial. Music definately works with the game, and helps it out a lot. The whole game is very mysterious and very cool to look at. Level transitions are really cool, especially those portal doorway-things later on, I’ve only seen that type of effect in a couple of games before (Descent I and Prey) and it looks like you got it figured out perfectly. I really don’t know how you do something like that.
However, load times at the beginning were incredibly long. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people gave up on the game waiting for the the levels to initialize after they’ve installed the game and tried to begin a new one. It must’ve taken at least 5 minutes (didn’t time it), which is really just too much time. In fact it was a full 50 seconds before it event moved to 1%. If it wasn’t for the cool little swirly things and the music, I would have not bothered waiting.
Also, perhaps the demo exited a bit too early for me to tell, but is there any really puzzling aspects that come into play? Right now the game seems like a bunch of walking around and finding places, and following trails using a simple flight system (do you think you could make the turning a little bit smoother? start out slow and pick up speed? even a 0.3 second transition would be good) but nothing particularly mentally challenging. You got the presentation down, but I’m not sure if there’s enough to get people addicted.
Anywho good luck with that, it seems like you’ve put a lot of time into it.
Thanks for the quick response. Glad to hear that it ran without any major problems (other than the long wait time at startup).
However, load times at the beginning were incredibly long
Yeah - I’ve noticed on some computers it takes a long time, and on others it doesn’t - with no apparent reason. On several of the computers I tried, it just takes about a minute to start up. The game actually loads all of the levels at the beginning, so there is little to no wait time when transitioning between levels.
I really don’t know how you do something like that. (in reference to the portals)
I used clipping planes, and had them update what parts of the scene they clipped based on where the camera was viewing from- in Java3D it’s the ModelClip (I think - it’s been a while since I looked at that part of the code). They can be kind of buggy if you are attaching and detaching sections of the SceneGraph as I do, but I managed to find some work-arounds.
is there any really puzzling aspects that come into play?
To be honest, I wasn’t sure what genre of game to call World Espiritu - because it doesn’t fit cleanly into any that I’ve heard of - any suggestions? The only puzzling thing about the game is simply the maze-like interconnecting of the levels. My goal was to keep the game as close to pure exploration as possible. I wasn’t sure if that would appeal to many people, but felt it was worth a try (it certainly makes the game different from anything else out there) - my reasoning was that I often get annoyed with games if they put up too many barriers to exploration and continuation of game-flow, and it would be interesting to see what a game with virtually no barriers to exploration would be like (depending on someones flying skills there are potential barriers, and if someone can’t find a certain location that can be a barrier as well).
took more than 7 minutes to load on my nice spec machine.
i played for less than 7 minutes, too confusing for me .
took more than 7 minutes to load on my nice spec machine.
What are your specs? If I can figure out what’s causing it to load slow on some machines (and possibly fix it) that would be a good thing. My computer is almost 2.5 years old and loads in about 1 minute. My specs are: Pentium 4, 3.06 GHz, 768 MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5600.
i played for less than 7 minutes, too confusing for me
can’t help you there - it’s intentionally a weird game, but the tutorial should be pretty helpful (I assume the tutorial text did show up for you?) . It also comes with a pdf manual - you’ll find it in the same program group in the start menu as the game is installed (should be called “World Espiritu”).
you can’t play much past 7 minutes anyway (depending on how long the tutorial takes you) because the demo version only lets you play for 3.1415 minutes after completing the tutorial.
Actually - if anybody gets a really slow start-up time (like the 7 minute one mentioned above),
In addition to listing your specs, I would also appreciate it if you could email me the following file:
debug.txt
It should be located in your the home directory for the game (typically: “c:\program files\World Espiritu”).
I’ll also be trying to find a computer with the same problem that I can get my own grubby little hands on -
since that should be the easiest way to diagnose the problem.
Thanks.
I found two apparently identical machines today - one of which starts my game in under a minute, and the other of which takes about 6 minutes.
Which just goes to show that Computer Science is definitely not a science - same experiment, same initial starting conditions - completely different results - yuck!
Preliminary testing seems to suggest that there is something not quite right with the jre I package with the game (1.5.02 or something like that).
Using jre 1.5.07 or whatever the latest version is seems to correct the problem on the machine that took 6 minutes. Once I’m satisfied that’s really
the problem, I’ll put up a new version of the game.
I’ve posted World Espiritu with the newer JRE and tested it on the “identical” computers - both start in about a minute now. So… fingers crossed… it should load in about a minute (or at least significantly faster) for those of you who were having 7 minute load times. It really seems to be some sort of issue with the JRE - I looked through their bug fixes for the latest version but couldn’t tell what half of them meant, so I’m not sure exactly why the new JRE fixes the problem (maybe garbage collection - I never trusted that stuff anyway ;). I did notice however that startup on the 6 mintute machine I had found can be choppy and messes with the music at times, but at least it has a reasonable startup time now.
That said, if anybody still has slow load times (>> 1 minute), let me know - I’m a little bit dubious of this fix.
will give it another try later today