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[Notch]

Is anyone else here doing the Java 4K Game Competition thingie this year?

It's a compo where you make a game in java (as an applet) in 4kb or less, and it starts in just two weeks and two days. I usually enter one or two games every year, and it's always a huge pile of fun. These days when all the games have to be playable as applets, it's also really accessible for players.
One downside is that a lot of the time is mostly spent working on compression, not doing clever coding tricks.

I'm considering entering two games this year, one demake of an indie game I really like (if you're reading this, thanks for letting me do it! :D) and one rather ambitious original game that I will probably fail to pull off.

[moi]

4k minecraft. Do it

[Sanojian]

He already did it

[moi]

Remember this day. the day moi got told.

[Strom]

He already did it

Wow

I might enter it , even if my java skills are limited

[Sos]

This IS tempting...

[BoxedLunch]

He already did it

i had a feeling that it would be that awesome...

[Theon]

He already did it

Holy smokes

[Toeofdoom]

Sounds interesting to me, though I'd need to figure out JOGL or something as I haven't used proper graphics in java before. The games there are awesome :D

EDIT: well I've used J2ME but that obviously won't be available here.

[OneMoreGo]

Very tempting, not used to trying to produce tiny things in Java.

[Cthulhu32]

Been thinking about this a little bit, I like limited compos and I haven't had a serious attempt at a compo in a while. Some of the entries are pretty awesome, Minecraft 4k has its own software 3D renderer. I did a little decompiling to figure out how you did some of your craziness, I'm not sure if you wrote that little 3D engine yourself or not, but its pretty awesome. Also I like the way a segment of memory if shared between functions, very clean.

I did a dirty port of a Raycaster tutorial to play around with the 4k limit, seems without any optimizations I was able to keep my jar down to 3,580 bytes.

Play (runs at ~40fps on my beastly machine, so expect bad frame rate)
Source

The compo doesn't start till December 1st, so I'm not going to play around with this anymore so I'm not DQ'd But hopefully some cool stuff comes out of this.

Edit: Looks like Notch already did a Wolfenstein for 2005 with Dungeon4k and Hunters4k, so 3D is definitely entirely possible in 4k. I'm kinda excited to put something together now.

[Cthulhu32]

Played around with ProGuard and doing some super compression on a single PNG texture. All I really did was XOR the colors on the texture to get the other textures from the original example, I'm super stoked! I also dropped the res down to 320x240 and the texture res to 32x32 and it runs like a champ.

Play (60fps 3.8kb3.6kb recompiled for 1.5)
Source

[pelle]

That raycaster even managed around 15 fps on my ancient eeepc, so it isn't that slow. Looks really good. Or, well, it looks like some lame Wolfenstein 3D clone, but cool for 3.6 kB Java). You just need to add some actual game to it.

You should change to or allow arrow keys for movement though. Important.

[Cthulhu32]

That raycaster even managed around 15 fps on my ancient eeepc, so it isn't that slow. Looks really good. Or, well, it looks like some lame Wolfenstein 3D clone, but cool for 3.6 kB Java). You just need to add some actual game to it.

You should change to or allow arrow keys for movement though. Important.

Yeah the game-components are not going to come until the competition actually starts (tomorrow). Right now I was just demonstrating how a 3D raycaster can be implemented at full speed The movement and turning calculations could be dependent on the current frame rate (to accommodate slower machines) but I might say screw it to save on some calculations. Also I might wind up not having time for this challenge at all, but I released full source if anyone else wants to play with this .

[jotapeh]

Cthulu32 I really like what you've done so far. Hits 60FPS nicely on my machine. Only problem is it seems to crash (both versions) pretty hard if I walk into walls too much.

[Cthulhu32]

Cthulu32 I really like what you've done so far. Hits 60FPS nicely on my machine. Only problem is it seems to crash (both versions) pretty hard if I walk into walls too much.

Thanks, all the math and texture lookups are from that tutorial linked at the bottom. I actually found the rest of the raycasting tutorials by that author, check em out:

http://www.student.kuleuven.be/~m0216922/CG/raycasting.html
http://www.student.kuleuven.be/~m0216922/CG/raycasting2.html
http://www.student.kuleuven.be/~m0216922/CG/raycasting3.html

The crash is a bug in the tutorial, where basically the rays do not actually check for an out-of-bounds on the texture look-up. So if you watch it in appletviewer -debug page.html, when it crashes you'll see an array out of bounds. I'll add a check to that eventually,I added a check so it won't crash anymore, I'm still not 100% sure if I want to go ahead and make a game from this because its really just a tutorial lesson and that probably would not be considered "fair".

Check out the latest release btw, I added floor/ceiling and sprites based on the final two tutorials, and its still under 4kb after I removed the back-buffer fill and the FPS counter. Calling functions in a Graphic takes up a lot of bytes o_o

http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/java/RayCaster_Dec3/page.html

[jotapeh]

Heh, awesome. I love the little dudes.