Sun Sponsored Game Dev Contest

General Discussions
#21

Hmm… a compo…

The 4k competition was pretty much fun, despite the fact, that I hadn’t finished my entry (animation + sound fx(!) | 3733 of 4096 bytes used).

Maybe it sounds odd, but it was way too time consuming. The same game in 16k would be done in 1 day… and it would run more than 2 times faster. However, I learned a lot and it was kinda fun after all :slight_smile:

Therefore I suggest that it shouldn’t be too restrictive.

64k (65536 bytes), at least one sound, Java2D… would sound like fun imo :slight_smile:

Or let’s say <=512kb and the size of “default” libs (lwjgl, jogl, jinput, xith, joribs etc) doesn’t count?

Several categories just doesnt work I guess… the community is a bit too small for that.

#22

Hehe :slight_smile:
The reason I alluded to the fact I don’t want to lift a finger without cash now is because after a year of toiling over Puppy Games I’ve completely run out of money and I’ve had to get a very poorly paying permie job writing performance managements software for local government. It is as exciting as it sounds! But that means I’ll not be doing any games programming for a few months while I try and stay on top of the situation. All my spare time is taken up doing TV graphics code to actually bring in money (the permie job is so poorly paid I lose about £2k a month working there if I didn’t do something on the side!)

Cas :slight_smile:

#23

Ok, I understand completely.
The idea was basically that you wouldn’t have to lift a finger, but just get the Puppy Games brand in the mix and hopefully get some more attention.

[quote]Several categories just doesnt work I guess… the community is a bit too small for that.
[/quote]
I’m afraid you’re right.

Maybe we also shouldn’t wait for Sun for a competition, but just do it ourselves? I mean, it seems that the Sun peeps have other things on their minds since last year it wouldn’t come off the ground as well.
We could set up some rules and start a simple competition, and then maybe Sun could just do some promotion for the winner. A ‘JGO Award’?
A grand competition with large prizes and such would be nice, but the community might be a bit too small to interest large sponsors as well.

And aren’t there any interesting non-java competitions? I mean, it could be much more important that java games break out of the java stigma and prove java’s strong points to the C++ people by winning a competition with a game that would be much more difficult to complete in a small amount of time if done in C++.

#24

IMHO the most interesting game competitions are the ones run by places like Lundam Dare - 48-hour and 72-hour competitions. They have the advantage of being short enough to get something good out of them, and a fixed date that keeps everyone interested.

#25

[quote] And aren’t there any interesting non-java competitions? I mean, it could be much more important that java games break out of the java stigma and prove java’s strong points to the C++ people by winning a competition with a game that would be much more difficult to complete in a small amount of time if done in C++.
[/quote]
Here’s one for Mac OSX (starts feb 1st goes for 21 days):

http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?p=59258

The argument of using java to ‘show up’ c++ devers seems a bit misguided to me. When I entered my little sidescrolling applet in ludum dare last year about half the people that tried it were using the ms vm and it of course ran like crap. If I had used a cross platfrom lib like allegro or sdl and c++ (or a java like subset of c++) I wouldn’t have had that problem.

So my point is; Sure the effeiency gain is there, but are java technologies (jogl and lwjgl) stable enough to work on Mac OSX or will users have to do alot of ‘fiddling’ to get the final product to work (which they of course won’t do)? Especially since I know you guys like to use alot of opengl extensions in your 3d apps which hardly ever work with low end, on board gfx chipsets. And there is still the ever present issue of ‘does the user have the most recent jre’.

#26

JWS minimizes fiddling at the user’s end to the point that they can just click once to download, install and play. As easy as it can get, really. :slight_smile:
But true… provided that they have a recent JRE installed. Just make sure your game is worth the one time download of a JRE if they haven’t got one.
I think lwjgl for Mac is pretty stable these days but I don’t own a mac so I can’t tell for sure…
But what’s the relevance of the openGL extensions not working on low end machines -argument to java or the stability of jogl or lwjgl ???

Erik

#27

AF works on the Mac. It uses several neat extensions too. Nearly all OSX users can run it without a glitch.

Cas :slight_smile:

#28

Was there some fiddling required in the AF code to get it to work on the Mac?

#29

No, not in the game code, but we can’t get it working under Webstart just yet.

Cas :slight_smile: