StreamGlider

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

Hi all,

http://streamglider.net

I’m happy to present the first public version of StreamGlider, a game I’ve been developing for some time now.

StreamGlider has the dubious honor of being the only contest winner that has its first public release after the contest (waaay after). How’s that for building community momentum ? ::slight_smile: Now it’s available thru webstart at the above website, along with screenshots, play instructions, and specific tech. requirements.

The game runs on Windows and Linux at the moment.
I’d like to get it working on Mac. If somebody’s willing to assist me (private email exchanges, and bearing with multiple try-out downloads), please email me, or just say so below.

On a related note, I’d like to hear from people with mostly recent hardware that can’t get the game to work. I’ve been especially diligent in that area, providing a utility to help detect outdated graphic hardware so people don’t waste bandwith downloading the game for nothing. I’d like to add a list of bad graphic cards/OS configs for that utility to show the user in case it still can’t determine if SG can run on the system.

The game so far contains 2 “migrations” (or level packs). You can also see a rough outline of future developments at the website.

Enjoy!
BK

#2

[quote]Hi all,

http://streamglider.net
[/quote]
Website is broken in a minor but annoying way - get rid of the fixed-size frames with disabled scrollbars (and throw a book on how to write HTML sites properly at your web designer :P). All the screenshots have the bottom 50% cut off because the frame is too small to display them and there’s no scrollbar.

Submit it to JGF and we’ll help (URL below). There are (off the top of my head) at least two testers with OS X. Since your game is webstarted already, you’re most of the way there ;).

#3

sorry, after ‘creating game structures’ nothing happened, no motion…
NO alt-tab, NO nothing --> brutal hardcore reset :stuck_out_tongue:

xp, 1800+,1024 ram, gf2

edit: your requirements checker says my system is ok

#4

The game seems to be interesting, I’ve played a bit, but it’s very slow… The game lag on my computer (3Ghz, 763Mo Ram, ATI 9800Pro) and level loading is so long…

I think using Java3D kill the perfs, you should try to look into LWJGL or JoGL, or if you want to keep the scenegraph stuff without changing all the code, try Xith3D :slight_smile:

Chman

#5

Request: get rid of Java3D! (sorry: I’m getting flashbacks to the pain J3D used to cause me :()

This is the second J3D game that I was pointed to in the last 48 hours that regularly crashes linux. The other one was known to work fine on old J3D builds, but had just updated to a more recent one. I was to date being generous and thinking it might just be that game, but not any more :(. While the J3D guys are continuing to distribute a “traditional” J3D build (in the old days, it used to crash something like 20% or more of computers reliably), you need to manually regression test every build extensively on many computers or else avoid it like the plague. My advice? Move to Xith. If you’ve got time, evaluate other scenegraphs, but at least you can (probably) port to Xith very quickly with almost no code changes.

BTW, this is a GeForce2 on Debian - a pretty good bet for a linux system, no fancy custom kernels, no weird Intel on-board graphics card, etc.

As far as JGF goes, you will need to make a JNLP that references a particular version of Java3D and make sure it’s a decent build, and then give us a while to verify that it’s an OK build. The last one I recall that we know worked on most machines was 1.3.1 (1.3.2 has some major regression bugs with sound IIRC).

#6

Why did you require 1.5 for windows and 1.4 for linux? 1.5 wasn’t out at the time of the competition, so thats not it. I don’t have 1.5 installed right now and am not going to for awhile. Any thoughts on a 1.4 version for windows?

Regards,
Dr A>

#7

Thanks for the feedback, always good to know when stuff breaks.

@blah
Can you email me a screenshot of what you mean? I got ok results in IE and Mozilla. The “web designer” is actually SimpleSite, an automated thingy, but sure, I can throw a book at it. How about yours? :slight_smile:

@Hansdampf
Noted. Can you try with windowed mode and no sound please ? I’m betting you’ll be luckier…

@Chman
You should get more than 30 FPS with your system, you have absolutely no excuses. :slight_smile: Level loading should be around 5 seconds in most cases. I’ll wait for other people to try it before I investigate, but thanks for your answer.

As far as J3D killing performance, I didn’t believe it 3 years ago, I still don’t believe it now. I’m actually glad I stuck with it, it’s not perfect but it suits me fine. I did try porting to Xith a while back but got disabled textures and incorrect geometry culling. Performance was better FPS-wise but that’s because they don’t cap with the vsync like J3D does. A non-issue from my POV. I may try again in the future tho, but it’s definitely non-trivial for my project, don’t know why yet.

If J3D has compatibility issues on Linux, that’s another story entirely. I’ve got ultra-smooth gameplay on Mandrake 10 with a GeForce3. Anybody else having Debian woes?

There’s nothing like a good reality check. Keep the comments coming.
BK

#8

@dranonymous

Full screen exclusive mode support is absolutely abysmal in 1.4 Windows. Sound under 1.4 is equally sucky/high-latency thanks to the absence of DirectAudioDevices. I ran the contest on the 1.5 beta VM.

I got no problem with 1.4 on Linux, thanks in part to the absence of a FSEM, so that’s why there’s a difference in requirements.

Even if you install 1.5, you can still disable its use from the java ControlPanel in Windows afterwards, so I don’t really see a problem ?

#9

yep! :smiley:
without fullscreen it works
why do you need a 3D api? looks like a 2D game

#10

Every benchmark I’ve seen of J3D versus GL4Java or Jogl shows J3D to be half the speed even for simple scenes.

#11

Ugly as sin ;D. Which is why a new one is in the pipeline as we speak…

PS all you need to do is edit your declarations and make sure there is NOT a “scrollbars=never” or similar. There is no real reason for this particular HTML setting except to allow incompetent web designers to hang themselves…

No complaints here about j3D performance. I know it’s poor, but it’s certainly well within what’s acceptable (even a 20% loss in performance for a game rendering at 80 FPS is usually irrelevant…).

But…J3D has always been an evil buggy piece of crap. My theory on this was that because Sun were refusing to allocate budget and manpower, refusing to bring it “into the fold” as a standard (or even stanard-ish) library, they were massively understaffed and couldn’t afford the time to fix their bugs.

Whatever. J3D has never gone two consecutive releases without a huge wadge of critical bugs…you can happily sing about how it works for you, but it’s well known that it never works for everyone.

You might want to do another test on this, just in case the recent releases have improved that. Shrug. I only recommend it because it has the possibility of being an easy port…

It’s always had problems on all platforms. Mostly (off the top of my head) they’ve been tracked down to hardware/driver bugs - but these are bugs that everyone else seems to work around, whereas J3D ploughs straight into them. The same graphics drivers that ran Quake3 and UT for many people smoothly would BSOD random numbers of seconds into running a tiny Java3D tutorial example app; not good.

Or, to put it another way, games submitted to JGF using other rendering libraries either don’t run (fail to change screen mode; broken screen-mode peeking; broken intialization code; etc) or work fine. Of 8 or 9 games using J3D that were submitted, only one worked (Flying Guns; although I’ve not retested that recently myself, so maybe that was a fluke), and the rest crashed or hung at various different points throughout the game. Some ran with < 1 FPS, others crashed reliably within two minutes of starting the game. Shrug.

#12

[quote]yep! :smiley:
without fullscreen it works
why do you need a 3D api? looks like a 2D game
[/quote]
…so was AlienFlux :wink:

#13

@Hansdampf

Thanks for persevering! I assume sound also plays ok for you?

The game has indeed a 2D gameplay, but some effects I use on the map require 3D (you’ll see soon enough if you keep on playing).

BK

#14

@kaffiene

I don’t make benchmarks, I make games. :wink: And you’re comparing apples and oranges (OGL bindings versus scenegraphs).

@all

Ok, so far I’ve got one person able to play the game out of three. Not a nice statistic, but I’ll press on. Since I’m already getting 100-ish page views, I’m assuming more than 3 people actually tried to play the game. Any untold successes? Come on, don’t be shy!

#15

well, 2 of those hits are mine, the first when i say its a 30Mb download…I freaked.

The next when I saw it needed 1.5+, I also freaked. I have 1.4.2_04 and Im not going to upgrade until Eclipse ANNOUNCE they have 1.5 support

DP

#16 

javax.sound.sampled.LineUnavailableException: line with format PCM_SIGNED 22050.0 Hz, 16 bit, stereo, 4 bytes/frame, little-endian not supported.
      at com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDevice$DirectDL.implOpen(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.media.sound.AbstractDataLine.open(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.media.sound.AbstractDataLine.open(Unknown Source)
      at borgknight.sg.audio.AudioManager.initAudioLines(AudioManager.java:548)
      at borgknight.sg.audio.AudioManager.InitChannels(AudioManager.java:100)
      at borgknight.sg.StreamGliderApp.createGraph(StreamGliderApp.java:301)
      at borgknight.sg.StreamGliderApp.main(StreamGliderApp.java:169)
      at borgknight.sg.loading.ProfileDialog.main(ProfileDialog.java:373)
      at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
      at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
      at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
      at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeApplication(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeMainClass(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.continueLaunch(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleApplicationDesc(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleLaunchFile(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
      at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Requirements checker says that I’m able to play the game, but it stops with exception given above.

#17

Sat through huge download, ran it, 100% CPU and no sign of any graphics…

I wish more people would use our library :frowning:

Cas :slight_smile:

#18

@abies and princec:
Thanks for trying it out guys, can I get your OS/gfx cards please? As well as your (abies) sound card? Can you also try launching w/o sound to see if it works ?

The requirements checker detects for 3D textures capabilites, I should probably check for proper sound support too. Kinda taking that for granted tho, probably a JavaSound issue, I’ve had one of those on Linux.

princec, didn’t you see anything at all? Splash screen, title screen, nothing?

#19

Not a sausage. Will try again now I’m home…

Cas :slight_smile:

#20

Geforce2, WinXP SP1. As far as sound card is concerned, it is something built in motherboard - I suppose it is “Realtek ALC650/655 Audio AC’97 Codec” - you can check out details at http://tw.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_Spec_GA-7N400%20Pro2.htm if you want to.