How about a ruling here Appel?
Oh, I was enjoying just standing on the sidelines 
I would ask the judges to review Scala Pong again if I believe it would have any affect on the results. Perhaps since it got through the filters we should have given it a more fair review.
In the footnote of the rules there is “The administration reserves the right to reject games that do not follow the spirit of the 4K competition, e.g. try to cheat or bypass competition rules.”. The “spirit of the 4K competition” is a the question here IMO.
The reason we’re all here, writing these games, is because of Java. The competition is about writing these games in Java. It wouldn’t be fun if most of the games were written in other languages, then what’s the point having “java” in the name of the competition?
But, the fact is I let Scala Pong slip through, wasn’t really thinking much about this issue… after the game ran in JavaVM, I probably should have disqualified it and we wouldn’t have this discussion. But this is still a interesting debate, I really didn’t anticipate 4K games written in another language that runs in JavaVM.
But this competition isn’t mine, it’s yours (the community). Personally I think we should only allow Java-written games in future competitions.
You’ve got to be very careful with such a restriction - it would preclude the usage of jasmin, or other java bytecode assembler languages. (something that could be considered the holy grail of 4k java programming)
As you don’t need to submit the source-code, it seems to me to be a pointless and ultimately unenforceable restriction.
Also, as there is no restriction on what bytecode manipulations are performed post-compilation, you could easily circumvent such a rule by submitting the source to an empty class (“class A{}”) and declare that the game functionality in its entirety is injected in a post-compilation step.
Because the lack of audio in a game means different things to different games. A game like the “Simon” clone requires audio to be complete whereas a pinball game is less so.
[quote]And I think it’s unfair that one game wasn’t properly judged (Scala Pong 4k). I know it violated rule gamma of the rule handbook, but since you can’t verify whether a game is written in Java or any other language that targets the JVM, maybe that rule should be changed. For example, how can anyone say that spiderball4k was written in Java and not in Scala?
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Sorry. Not only could I get it to run on my Mac, but the developer said they went out of their way to do this in Scala and submit it to the Java 4K comp just to see if he could do it. Out on principal.
[quote]I’m rather satisfied that Thief4k got a good overall score despite lower technical and presentational scores. People liked it, but it didn’t appear overly technical or presentational. I think that’s a good sign. ;D
[/quote]
The mark of a solid game. You have the foundation for a great mini-game, now polish it up some. 16K comp perhaps?
That is true. I talked shortly with jojoh about this, that was after I posted my earlier reply, and realized this problem then. It may be impossible to enforce it anyway. Perhaps this isn’t really a problem? As long as it is a java bytecode and runs on consumer JRE’s then I guess it should be fine. If people want to spend their jolly good time on hacking through bytecode then fine by me
Or if you make a requirement that it be 1.5 compliant code then it’s a non-issue as well. 
Wait… why is the 2008 contest done already? I was going to enter. 
the competitions usually start around December and finish the end of February… thus '08 competition was from dec '07 to feb '08.