Tube Dreams 4K

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2007
#1

Hi there!

Here is my first entry to the 4K contest… It’s a remake of the old Pipe Dreams… Any suggestions and criticisms are welcome. It includes a micro sound effect (but if audio initialization fails it will proceed without using it), but I preferred to invest bytecodes in the game mechanics and visuals rather than in sound.

This is the first 4K program I wrote, ever, and I came upon quite a few surprises. I hope to improve with my next entries, which will be more action oriented :slight_smile:

Webstart : http://www.ahristov.com/tubedreams/tubedreams.jnlp
Instructions : http://www.ahristov.com/tubedreams/

Screenshot:

http://www.ahristov.com/tubedreams/game_over.gif

#2

Err it tried to make me download java 1.5.0_08 to run it… why is this necessary? I have 1.6, should be backwards compatible…

#3

Oopps… Must have messed the JNLP file. Seems I wrote 1.5.0 instead of 1.5+. I’ll fix it in a moment.

#4

Idea is fine, but u should really consider running it at less then “100%” CPU, as my PC got unusable when i played it. :-
Something like Thread.sleep(1) should do.

#5

Thread.yield(), even

nice game, I’m not quite smart enough though (I faulter under time pressure ;))

#6

Ok, fixed it, although I had to remove an effect because of the increased bytecode size :frowning: I don’t notice any difference in the computers I’m trying it, though (it gets at most about 45% of CPU usage on WinXP + Java 5)… Could you please test it again now? It’s currently yielding for 30ms on each game iteration.

#7

It’s still running at 50% on my machine WinXP. Which means the thread is still running at full capacity given that my Pentium 4 has hyper-threading (dual hardware threads).

Maybe Thread.sleep(30); instead?

Cool game BTW. My girlfriend suggested a pipedreams remake, but you already executed on it perfectly.

#8

Still Running at 100% CPU, but the Rest of my PC is still usable, so it works :slight_smile:

Maybe you could save some bytes, when removing the “link”-Text at the Bottom of the game ;D