Hi!

So we practically finished our first J2ME port and wonder how we could organize beta testing on various phones. In a way, so that the games is not available on every schoolyard before we could sell it, of course....

Thanks for any hints,
Andreas

Thanks for your very informative reply. Well , the whole point about the deal is the advertising, I guess. If you sign up with any  distributor, the company should be able to finance some TV commercials, where customers are asked to send a premium SMS to 55555 and get the game immediatly.
We are already discussing the idea of crippleware, but our current game has more or less 1 level (that you can play for a looong time), so it's kinda hard to sell additional levels. One option would be a time restriction. So you could only play for 3 minutes, before you are asked to send some money. You would get an ID then to unlock the game.
Anyway...we'll find a way to sell our little game, I'm sure.
To the Palm and Pocket PC's: I really don't think you can make any cash from them. I got me a used Palm from eBay on Saturday (my first PDA) and have already found tons of freeware games etc. Since I need the computer for downloads anyway, it's pretty obvious to download them immediatly, instead of buying them via SMS or so?

Thanks again for your help,
Andreas

Good idea with the download. But: how do you make money from it? Shareware? Don't think it'll work. My best bet would be a premium SMS as it is called here. But those SMS phone numbers are _really_ expensive, so you have to sell lots of copies before you make any money actually...  

I watched the review of Elkware's internal gate on TV yesterday
http://www.midlet-review.com/images_color/infernalgate.gif
, and it looks really good. So raycasting is feasable on a cellphone. Asked the developers what methods they use and they told me it's MIDP 1 plus a Nokia method to draw a screenbuffer. Texture scaling seems to be done with MIDP 1 only.

3) Check http://www.forum.nokia.com/main.html

4) There's a recent thread on raycasting in this forum?

In the attachment to the following mail is the first version, that you can actually play with (just a few moves).

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/java-chess/message/441

I want to release a complete zipball, when our webmaster has some time again.

The attachment to this mail holds the first version, that you can actually play with (just a few moves).

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/java-chess/message/441

There's no complete tarball yet available, just lots of patches.

Zane, I think you want to keep aoo the sources in one source tree at the end? Do you think it's a good idea to do all these ports with different people?`I'd like to keep the folks to the required minimum. The only exception from my point of view is a Opensource project, where you try to organize the project in a way, that the folks work on different features instead of different ports if possible.

Ciao,
Andreas

Ok, I think I have an idea here that could be good enough for this Vodafone challenge as an example. If you want to hear it, mail me at mail@andreas-rueckert.de

I don't think, that you were overly pesimistic. Take a look at

http://www.asynchrony.com

I always liked the concept of this site, although it lacks a couple of features IIRC...

Ciao,
Andreas

Not bad...but it seems the site doesn't really take it far enough? It seems you simply post a link to a project? It would be nice, if such a site would also support communication a bit and even support the actual development a bit more? Maybe some Sourceforge feature?

But thanks for the link. I was not aware of this site before...

Ciao,
Andreas

So are you the person, who could teach me how to become a great game graphics designer or do you agree, that we'd just need a place, where we can bring both groups together?

I know a couple of 'Artist Artist's' and have just interrupted the collaboration with one of them after 5 weeks of frustration. It's one thing to paint lots of nice graphics (that you can never use for the game) and it's another thing to create good game graphics.. The problem is the understanding of how a game actually works (what sprites are required etc). So I'm only interested in a collaboration with a graphical designer, who knows how games actually work, since I'm too old to ruin my nerves...

Ciao,
Andreas

I think you have a point with the book and learning stuff. But I don't think you are right about the 'just do it' stuff. Look, I think I have a great idea and about 300kb sources here. I've looked around for graphical artists, but no luck so far. I guess the problem is simply, that there's point where coders and artist could meet.
One alternative are games, where you (more or less) need no graphics. One reason for my constributions to java-chess.de

How long does it take to become a good coder? If we are talking about a bit of experience in actual software engineering, so you can design an app properly, I'd say a couple of years. Don't you think it makes sense to leave the coding part to someone, who already has the experience? And then it's also the sheer amount of work. You need quite a few graphics and also a couple of 1000 LOCs to write a good game. If most graphical artists could learn the coding part so easily, we would have quite a few one-man game design companies around. Where are the great games from them? I looked around for great games and took a look at the teams behind them. It's more like 10-15 people if you look at the major companies in the market.
I've another guy with exactly the same problem here, so there must be a way to find a solution for this problem.
BTW: did you hear about this Vodafone game challenge? I'm thinking about joining it and it would be great to get some folks together to form a nice team. I've already started brainstorming for game ideas, but my best idea so far would be a Black Adder like game. But I guess with so much black humour it's hard to make it in the finals...must think again...

Here's another coder with an artist problem...maybe we could collaborate to solve our problem? I wonder, if there could be a website, where artists and coders come together? Something like asynchrony.com? Some people might post game concepts to attract coders and artists and registered members would apply for a position in the development team by posting pieces of their work on the site?

Hi!

Here is the announcement for the latest JC release:

http://www.JavaGaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=Announcements;action=display;num=1056104268

and yesterday, I managed to compile the first sources under J2ME, but most of the UI will have to be rewritten. So any help is welcome...

Ciao,
Andreas

The Java-Chess project is looking for volunteers to tune our code, add new features and so on. Code is under GPL.
See the announcement for the latest version here:

http://www.JavaGaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=Announcements;action=display;num=1056104268

Hi!

We finally managed to release Java-Chess 0.1.0 Alpha 3 today.
Download is here:
http://www.java-chess.de/downloads.html

Changes are here:
http://www.java-chess.de/changes.html

We are currently in the middle of a refactoring, so there are more sources to come. Today, I also managed to compiler the first sources under J2ME, so we hope to see JC soon on cellphone, too.
Critic and especially constributions ar very welcome. Please subscribe to our little mailing list, if you are interested:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/java-chess

Thanks for your attention,
Andreas Rueckert

Are you working on a commercial project? Any chance for a collaboration?

You do all this on the fly, when you have checked screensize after appstart? I'd guess this will get way too slow. I was working with fixed screensizes here and a preprocessor system. so I can generate code for different screensizes at compile time.

So did you code anything? The reason, why I'm asking is, that we are working on a Java chess app, which might contain some of the functionality, you are interested in?

What can I say. After adding the line here, my game had transparent sprites with WTK 1.0.4. I know for sure , since I especially had to add the line to make our current game work (we need transparency in our sprites). We don't use any vendor specific APIs yet.

I added the line to my WTK 1.0.4 under Linux to make it work. I did not download WTK 2 yet, since it requires JDK 1.4 and I have only 1.3.

I added
=====================
# Enable transparent PNGs for sprites.
enablePNGtransparency=true
======================
to the properties file of my testing device to activate it here.

How do you compute what wall you are looking at and how far away from the player it is?
If look at the 1st diagram here
http://www.phoenixgarage.org/homevr/resources/renderingsoftware/25d/wolf3dstyle/doom.txt
, you see the problem.
How to compute each ray? My first, maybe rather naive, approach would be to run Bresenham's line algo for each column of the screen. Maybe compute fixed offsets for each line (representing a view angle), and then simply add those offsets to the player's current position. Run the line algo to find the first collision with any object (maybe support by some quadtree data structure for any objects in the scene) . If no objects are hit by the ray, paint some black background or simply leave roof and ground as they are (they could fade out to black towards the middle of the screen).

Did not see the C implementation. But  I guess the initial implementation is pretty much obvious. The question is just, if a J2ME device can run bresenham 100x and still achieve a reasonable framerate. But it seems that StrangeMaze is already the answer to this question...

This StrangeMaze game seems to be a pretty good start. I guess that's the direction J2ME games will go in the future...

On the Wolfenstein link: you mean the phoenixgarage.org link? I could only find a link to some Doom details there...

I'd start with the most simple approach. Compute the length of the wall, then paint the wall in one color, roof and bottom in another color. That's almost castle Wolfenstein?