Slick Forums

Hey all,

I've completed my second game on my way to introducing myself to Slick. I call it 'Cave In'; it's a simple "avoid the falling stuff" game where you're a miner in a cave/mine and there are falling stalactites that you must avoid.
Every 10 seconds the fall speed of the objects will increase until, well, until you can no longer keep up (perhaps there should be a ceiling to this speed). You use 'A' and 'D' to move left and right to avoid the falling objects. If you die your score will be displayed and you will need to press 'S' to start a new game. The score will continuously increase until you die.
Previously there were performance issues with the applet, I think they've been fixed, at least for me they have, let me know. Other than that, it looks at least presentable for me. I did all the gfx by hand with paint/Gimp and that's always the hardest as I am never satisfied, but there is only so much I can do. Also, it's another silent game... I really need to stop saying I'll fix that and actually do it.

Direct link to game applet:
http://www.onewordtale.com/games/CaveIn/cavein.html
Feel free to check out my other games, just Real Knight for now:
http://www.onewordtale.com/othergames.html
Or even my first project with a website, One Word Tale:
http://www.onewordtale.com

It's really slow on loading jars and slow on play


About applet. Can you consider using this a splash before load applet? this method for example? http://ninjacave.com/appletsplash

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

Very good idea, did not know this was possible! Now, you said the game was still running slow as well? Stuttering? Or was that the slow loading you were mentioning?

slow on load and play

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

When I first started the applet it took almost a minute before the stalactites actually got to the bottom of the playing field. The next time they went much fast, so fast in fact that I could often not manage to avoid a stalactite even though I tried.

It's a nice simple idea, but you may have to balance it out a bit more.

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Researcher & game development hobbyist.
http://www.grunnt.nl

Wooow.. I now know what Gornova meant... it had been running fine for me until I just tried now.. the stalactites were barely moving.. I don't know why this was fine before but now it's not... definitely something I will look into..

sorry!!

There is something odd going on with my movement code. I am using a float for the stalactite position but if its under a certain value it is getting rounded to 0 instead of up. I don't think it should be rounded at all:

y += (float)delta/1000*speed;

where delta is typically 1,2, or 3 (and an int). If speed (also a float) is less than 500 then they move horribly slow, and if its greater it moves as it is now...

my suggestions is to move using a counter something like:



so your entity move down every second or so

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

I should use something like that perhaps..

What I just did was use setTargetFramerate on my container; when I wasn't doing this it was up as high as 500 or so and the delta was too small (and is an int) so this was a problem. I now limited it to 60 and it seems to be working a lot better, with delta being around 16.
I do see how your solution would take care of this though and that would be another option.. Should be okay now.

--ED
Not sure if it's bad practice to set a target frame rate..

I'm not 100% sure but I think that Java may consider the "1000" to be an int, and because of this round off the 1000*speed part of the equation. You could try using 1000.0 or 1000f instead?

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Researcher & game development hobbyist.
http://www.grunnt.nl

I see, I appreciate your explanation. The way I saw it and think Java computes it is, both delta and 1000 are ints, but by casting delta to a float the outcome of delta/1000 is also a float. I think you only need 1 operator to be a float in division for the outcome to be a float. Then the speed is also a float so it should be fine, but there is no harm in adding the 1000f, so I should.

Trust me and try, it's a 5min change and works

setting target frame rate is NOT a bad pratice, but a guarantee that your game works fine on every computer

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

That was an excellent tutorial you posted up there, Gornova.

-edit
Whatever you guys did, the game is running much smoother than before. I couldn't really tell if the game took long to load because I'm on a real fast connection at the campus here.

about load time: put file into a googlecode account

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

Instead of implementing a fade in for the stalactites, they now creep down slowly before they wait and fall. I couldn't figure out fading, I think alpha can only be set once per image, I'd need some kind of filter image over the top so I just went with this.

As for hosting my code elsewhere, wouldn't that be slower =P than being right there on the server?