Yet another scroller

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#1

Hullo all,

Thought I’d get some feedback on my first scroller. It has reached the “story and better graphics to be added later” phase (which is were I tend to abandon a project :wink: ), and the tile collision detection needs a little tweaking.

http://home.chello.no/~ttollefs/game/scroller/scroller.html

Anywho … I’d be interested to know how it runs on other machines (choppy etc). I had a buddy of
mine test it and apparently everything froze when he picked up either the weapon or the medkit, but I think
that has more to do with an antiquated JRE on his end. (I hope)

#2

How about a fullscreen Webstart application version? Pleeease? ;D ;D ;D

Other than that it’s kind of cool. Is there any way off the level, or is it pretty much constrained to what we see?

#3

Looks cool, I’m waiting for someone to come out with a Commander Keen like game again.

#4

Picked up weapon OK, but … it was REALLY slow on a 1Ghz machine (like, approx 5 fps). Apart from very very jerky due to low FPS, looked great.

Couple of bugs:

  1. When you have a dialog up, it’s really hard to get rid of. In the end, I just had to hit every key on the keyboard to get the buggers to disappear.

  2. Got this halfway throuhg (didn’t crash, just printed the error message on console:)

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 15
at GameEngine.drawForeground(GameEngine.java:485)
at GameEngine.renderGameOffscreen(GameEngine.java:853)
at GameEngine.update(GameEngine.java:801)
at sun.awt.RepaintArea.paint(RepaintArea.java:169)
at sun.awt.motif.MComponentPeer.handleEvent(MComponentPeer.java:405)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Component.java:3678)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Container.java:1627)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Component.java:3477)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:456)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:201)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:151)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:145)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:137)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:100)

#5

I’d just like to add a big “thank you” for putting in a clear, simple controls-screen in-game! If only everyone did this…

/me cheers

…although it would be nice to have the menus mouse-controlled too!

…and even nicer to redefine keys! some of them are in “stupid” positions on my KB.

/me eagerly awaits webstart version running 10 times as fast

#6

Thanks for the feedback. Why the lack of love for the basic applet? ;D I’ll see what I can do to get a webstart application up and running. Never really done that before but I’m sure I can google my way to a tutorial of some kind. What’s the basic advantage? Runs faster?

As far as the level goes there’s really no where else to go aside from the two rooms.

Not sure why things slow down when items are picked up. A dialog box pops up then so maybe that’s where the problem lies …

Now about the array out of bounds exception … well as long as the game didn’t crash lets pretend it never happened! :wink:
Suggestions on more user friendly keys are welcomed.

Well, I guess thats it for now. I’m of to Google a little :slight_smile:

*little edit: Thanks for the control screen cheer :slight_smile: I ripped the little key pictures and I’ll be sure to mention their rightful owner when I get the credits up and running. (There … now I’m in the clear of any lawsuits!)

#7

I know I should buy a new monitor and move into the 21st century, but why is this applet so freaking huge? Its a bit to big to display in a browser at 800x600. Also, it would be nice to load all your resources at startup. My crappy dialup isp dropped my connection while I played and when I entered the other room I got this;

Its always goot to do something in those try/catch blocks!

Otherwise, it ran smoothly. I agree with these guys it could be sped up a bit. Also, I’m not sold on the green block guy fun factor :stuck_out_tongue: .

#8

hehe … the green block guy is only a temp. I can draw VERY basic tiles like ladders/air vents etc, but any sprite animation of the hero would end up as a poorly drawn stick figure :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the error message … I’ll see what I can do to prevent it.

#9

Well, the webstart thing-a-ma-jig is up and running (I hope. It worked here but that never seems to hold true for others :P).

http://student.iu.hio.no/~s113388/SpaceStationII.jnlp

No fullscreen yet.

#10

It works

#11

yup, works fine on linux.

A few weirdnesses though (didn’t mention earlier)

  • it is allegedly a “signed applet” according to webstart (JWS’s emphasis!).
  • it’s really disturbing the way that every piece of scenery that appears in front of the player in depth sort is artificially intelligent - they jump either left or right or up and down when you walk around. The toxic waste in the gun room jumps up and down, the blue thing outside that room wiggles left and right. Bizarre :slight_smile:
  • there’s lots of other niggles with gameplay etc, but I think nothing important until you fix the very very very slow speed problem!
#12

Works quite nicely, and well polished, but it would be good to have a few more levels to play around in. :slight_smile:

Speed seems to be all over the place - sometimes smooth, sometimes sluggish, occasionally speeding up a little. Doesn’t seem to have any sort of pattern, I’d guess it might be drawing slowdown. A few other drawing glitches here and there as well - occasionally tiles ending up in totally the wrong place and ‘shimmering’ objects, could be rounding errors? Or perhaps some odd double buffering problems.

#13

Thanks again for all the feedback … though this is starting to freak me out a little. The tiles seem to stay in place here! Maybe I should start a new thread in a more appropriate topic and post a little code (unless none of you mind if this thread runs a little off topic).

About the game slowness … I have removed all anti aliasing and transparency operations so maybe it’ll run a little faster now (At least its not abusing the CPU as much as before … according to Windows Task Manager :stuck_out_tongue: ) I’ve updated the link from my previous post.