StarballX v0.19 (gage based)

[zulo]

hey

starballx v0.21 is ready for a test, its working now. (id be really shocked if it doesnt work on any other computer this time)

I tried to make it webstart but the university webspace is not available right now, so I had to put it somewhere else and they didnt support jnlp.

So you must download the jar if you want to test it. It still happens that it wont start until the third time you try it. the other times it halts at a white screen.

its located here:
http://starballx.port5.com/sbx021.jar

[SpuTTer]

I can roll the ball off the cliff and then it locks up. Does it do anything else?

[zulo]

Thanks for taking the time to try it.

theres no limit to where you can go so when you get outside the map the game crashes.

The only thing you can do is jump,walk left and right and jump the monster so it dies. This is just a basic test for the game, this is what i got so far. The game detects when you hit the monster but you dont die yet, you can jump the monster and kill it but you have to hit right on top of it. But now that I know it works on other computers i can continue with making more sprite types,different enemies and more logic. Think i need better graphics too but thats the last thing i wanna do.

[SpuTTer]

what are the controls? I didnt see them in your post. Forgive my ignorance! I can only move left and right. Up and down dont do anything.

[system]

Ok, the game isn’t working on my machine.

I get the company logo. I get the “Play” / “Quit” menu. I use the arrow keys to select “Play”. Then I see “loading…” then I see some graphics.

On the upper-right portion of the screen, I see the message “paused…p to continue”. I press “p”, “P”, “ctrl” “space” whatever and anything, and it never goes any further. If I Alt+Tab to another application and then come back, I just get a blank white screen. Perhaps your application is loosing its video memory (are you using volitile images, or BufferStrategy?), and you’re not re-rendering your screen properly.

Also, is there a way to exit your program, besides using the Task Manager to force-quit it?

On the other hand, I applaud your efforts, and I’d love to see you’re game, so please let me know (in this thread) when there’s another update / fix.

If it matters to you, I’m running:
WinXP Pro
Athlon 1800+
512 RAM
GeForce 3 Ti200
Sound Blaster Audigy x-gamer

[DrBizzar0]

Works fine on my computer (WinXP, gf4, jdk1.4.2), as SpuTTer I can’t find the jump button though.

[kevglass]

Fraid I get the same as “kul_th_las” above.

ATI Mobility 9000
P2.6 Ghz
512MB
WinXP Home

Kev

[zulo]

Here is the buttons you can use in the game:
Enter = jump
left arrow button = go left
right arrow button = go right
p = pause/unpause
esc = exit the game

And in the game menu the red fonts are the selected one…

hm… I use bufferstrategy(2) in the game.

Yes, maybe the graphics screen arent properly redrawn, I usually blank the screen with fillRect(0,0,width,height); when making applets. But in this game I have skipped it because of the background Image that are being drawn first and it is cleaning the screen in a way…

But do you think I should clear the screen between each frame with fillRect(0,0,screenwidth,screenheight) ?

Did you also notice that the images arent loaded right away? I use ImageIO and thought that should load all images right away… some times the menu image doesnt appear until some seconds later. I will try to make a resourceloader class or something to load the images instead of loading images in all kind of strange places in the code.

I have some ideas of what could have gone wrong here, so il try to fix those problems, then ill post here when a newer version is ready after i make some new functions and improve gameplay etc…

thanks for the applaud, that means much to me.

[system]

For your non-updating frames / “should I clear the frame” question, I point you to the API documentation for the BufferStrategy class.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/awt/image/BufferStrategy.html

I would look particularly at the “contentsLost()” method of this class. I suspect that on my machine and kevclass’s machine, this method would return ‘true’. While on your test machine, it probably would not.

I had a similar problem with some code I wrote a couple of months ago. Sometimes I would just get a white/gray screen, and not graphics. I was clearing the my Graphics object’s draw surface every frame, and it wasn’t doing any good.

What I wasn’t doing: I wasn’t checking the “contentsLost()” method of the BufferStrategy class, so I was trying to use a section of video memory for which my program had no claim, and my program wasn’t doing anything to try to reclaim that video memory.

I was naively doing this because I thought that calling the “contentsLost()” method was going to slow down my code, but found out later that my rendering algorithm was what was slowing me down.

I hope this is a solution for you.