Here’s my remake of a classic C64 game:-
http://www.cruithne3753.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/UridiumGL/
It’s the first complete game I’ve put on the Internet, I hope it’s not too bad. 
Runs great on winXP, Java1.5b, gf4 and 2.0ghz athlon.
I suck as much at it as the original uridium so it must be a true hearted remake
And yes would be nice with a Java Webstart version also ;D
As a Braybrook fan of course I’ve to test your version. 
Looks and sounds nice but … it’s way too fast. Actually so fast I’m dead within two seconds.
Java 1.4.2 and a ATI Radeon (which uses different VSync behaviour than Geforces with OpenGL I think).
Also the scroll area horizontally only takes half of the screen the right part is filled with the repeating background…
Very faithful to the original indeed! Very nice job!!
However, I have to second Bombadil in that it is much too fast. Not much fun at all, being killed moments after the game starts…
Anyway, didn’t find any technical glitches under Windows XP, Java 1.4.2.
The dreadnought graphics are painted with 1 bit transparency onto the background, aren’t they? At least, there are some jagged edges, and a not-so-beautiful white outline along the big chain links of the dreadnought. Not that it would matter - the graphics are very nice!
Looks fun, but…needs a webstart version ;). And send me the details and I’ll add it to JGF (preferably once you’ve got a webstart URL).
way cool, but waaaay to fast for me!
WinXp, Java 1.5ß, Radeon 9700 (non pro) 2.7GHz P4
dude, wayyyyy toooo fast, i was pressing arrow keys randomly because I keep dying. Did you hardcode movements? you should make em time based
Dual Amd64 1.4Ghz
Ati Radeon 9200 // oops wrote 2900 before!
2Gb RAM
Yes, it definitely have issues with radeons (with mine too).
But it’s really good!
Webstart, webstart, webstart!
6 players, 3 demands for webstart, and counting…
it dont bother me, I dont like webstart, so without it is fine by me.
Webstart hogs down your PC by keeping the game in cache, and you can’t delete certain stuff of it, you gotta delete it all. Placing the games where I know where they are is good by me.
DIE WEBSTART
[quote]it dont bother me, I dont like webstart, so without it is fine by me.
Webstart hogs down your PC by keeping the game in cache, and you can’t delete certain stuff of it, you gotta delete it all. Placing the games where I know where they are is good by me.
DIE WEBSTART
[/quote]
Hahahah! I think you’re underestimating the the usefulness of webstart. Think about a gamer, who simply wants easy access to a game. Webstart achieves that.
Anyway, you shouldn’t have said that when Blah^3h is around. AFAIK he is a big defenders of the technology, hopefully he’ll lecture you beause I do think pro-webstart points are valids
ps: can you honestily imagine that to install Quake (for example), you would buy the CD, and then would manually copy files to your computer. Then, you would read a note from Carmack saying :“ah, please go to url1 to download opengl.dll if you use windows, and url2 to download whatever…”? Yes: DIE EASY INSTALL PROGRAMS!
“Webstart hogs down your PC by keeping the game in cache, and you can’t delete certain stuff of it, you gotta delete it all. Placing the games where I know where they are is good by me.”
Actually, that comment about caching and deleting isn’t exactly valid. At least for the 1.5 webstart, it will add the application to your Add/Remove Programs so you can completely uninstall even the cached versions.
Exactly; well-put.
Nah, if someone’s dumb enough to say “die webstart” after seeing people demand it, and not stopped to think about why the market is demanding something, and whether that means they should probalby find out why, then they probably deserve never to write a popular game (which is what tends to happen if you completely ignore your players).
Again, well-put. In a nutshell, for me, webstart means I can install all games in a totally platform-independent way, even when they insist on using native library apps.
For instance, linux installs of LWJGL still do not work “out of the box” (I’ve sent a note to the lwjgl.org website pointing out their own installation instructions won’t work on linux). But…I’ve run loads of webstarted LWJGL games and didn’t even notice they were using LWJGL - it all just happened “as if by magic”. Which is what webstart is supposed to do ;D.
My only complaint (aside from the bugs, which appear to have mostly disappeared now) is that you cannot export things cleanly from webstart into a jar. This is especially desirable considering java now has an explicit mechanism for doing such things in 1.5 (unless I’ve been eating too many cookies and having strange dreams recently :o) - and I’m fairly confident a right-click-export-as-jar will appear real soon now. It is a major PITA that you cannot currently distribute your webstarted downloads to friends directly from your webstart cache (not without farting about in the FS and learning the vagaries of how JWS works).
Right, I’ve spent a couple of days ruminating on this…
I’ve only just realised that the only things that might be controlling the timing is Window.update() at the start of my loop
and Window.paint() at the end. It has been working perfectly fine for me, but it may be different on other set ups. I’ve also noticed that I seem to have got away without doing any double-buffering stuff. LWJGL does that for me, right?
I think I’ll make the aliens a bit less trigger happy, and give the mines a slightly longer launch delay, too.
A friend of mine has just got a new Compaq Presario, 2.7Ghz with Intel Extreme graphics, it took a little tweaking of the OpenGL settings to get it running reasonably smoothly. The white line round the edge of the dreadnought graphics shows up on it. Not sure what I can do about it, it’s probably down to the way the stencil buffere is used. A stencil buffer is cut out using the dreadnought tiles, then a huge quad for the surface texture is drawn into this before the tiles are overlaid using alpha blending to get the bas-relief effect. Before I worked out how to use the stencil buffer, I pre-generated the tiles, but this could mean over 2000 tiles per dreadnought!
I’m now trying to get Web Start to work, I didn’t even know how do this when I put the page up, it will be a few days before I get it working; I’m still on ye-olde dialup so its a bit slow on the upload-download-see if it works cycle. Seeing some of the recent posts, I think I should leave the usual download as an option.
Kev has done a nice 2-minute tutorial on getting webstart to work, even comes with sample JNLP source files you can rip ;). It’s linked to from the “submit your game” page (linked to from the front page) on http://www.grexengine.com/sections/externalgames/
Thanks for that pointer, there is now a Web Start option available, (Adjusted URL):
http://www.cruithne3753.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/games/uridiumgl
Next, gameplay tweaks…
Hm. I think your JNLP is not Linux/Mac friendly.
This is how one of my own JNLPs looks like. For lwjgl have a look at the one for AlienFlux.
<resources os="Windows" arch="x86">
<nativelib href="jogl-natives-win32.jar"/>
</resources>
<resources os="Linux" arch="i386">
<nativelib href="jogl-natives-linux.jar"/>
</resources>
<resources os="Solaris" arch="sparc">
<nativelib href="jogl-natives-solsparc.jar"/>
</resources>
<resources os="MacOS X" arch="ppc">
<nativelib href="jogl-natives-macosx.jar"/>
</resources>
– EDIT: changed arch on Linux from x86 to i386
Ditto :(. Would like to play this game…
I do not want to be picky on this but webstart is definitely NOT the right term regarding JNLP files. The thing is called Java Network Launching Protocol (or JNLP).
Webstart is Sun’s reference implementation of that specification. I often hear people cry Webstart is doing nasty things in its cache and these people believe this is the fault of the JNLP specification. If you are unhappy with webstarts behaviour try OpenJNLP:
http://openjnlp.nanode.org/ -> too bad that it is abandoned for some time now :’(