Huh, that's a good idea indeed. I get caught up trying to solve the more aesthetic elements and ignore the more major elements perhaps too much

Yah, but I figured the solution might be something smaller than I was thinking. I'm not comfortable enough with sql yet that I could put it cleanly into my game, I think.

Anyhow, would SQL actually be able to handle that many entries significantly better? 1 million entries takes like 30 seconds worst case with how I was doing it [on my olde computer at least]

I'm hoping to have a list holding previous used names, so that each one can only be used once. This is because once player's die they will stay dead and need to make a new character. There can be repeat, but they will be named "Dumb Jerk the second", or whatever, to show that they're same-named descendent.

Anyhow this list can potentially get huge from all the players making new characters, and I'm having problems thinking of a way to add to the list in a quick manner once it gets big. I tried using a random access file with the names in alphabetical order, in which searching for a existant name is decently quick in large files. However there seems to be no way to write to it without either writing to the end or overwriting something else. The alternative, re-writing the entire file with the new entry is very slow.

Perhaps using mysql would speed things up here? I had problems finding what the runtimes were for inserting and finding stuff in an alphabetically ordered list that was large, and aside from that I don't really want to use mysql if I don't have to.

Any ideas on how to handle such a large list [30mb+] for this?

Humm actually, adding



seemed to have fixed everything up. I was actually doing everything on the EDT already, but you set me on the right track on what to look for though,

Thanks!

Something funky seems to be going on when I try to move or resize the jFrame. It doesn't consistently happen either, like there's a 20% chance each time I resize or move it.

Anyhow what happens is, my application stops drawing, but everything else keeps running. Even the methods that are supposed to draw keep on running.

If it even helps, my draw loop inside the jFrame looks like this:



Any ideas on how to check/restore the drawing once this happens? Or how to prevent it maybe?

The sound is kind of annoying 

Thirding this... it might be nice to ensure you aren't spawned onto badyguys too.

Very cool though 

I got ADHD and only played it for about 8 minutes. It would make the controls feel a lot smoother though if you could change direction mid air, and if holding up only made the character jump once. While it's not as realistic to be able to move and change direction mid air, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to navigate and the player won't have to work against the game to do something simple... 

Edit: the lack of music and violence made me quit early, but those aren't exactly bad things so...

Hey, it might be nice if you made it so you can only cycle through tools that you actually have. It's a little frustrating having to cycle through all of the tools if you pass the one you want to use.

Looking pretty nice though 

I was working on a multiplayer mario game, got kinda far but I kind of got bored of it since my heart was somewhere else. If you want to check it out let me know and I'll up the source code or a demo of what I got.

Edit:  I have every single tile from the game anyhow, if you're not interested in the multiplayer thing:

http://www.homph.com/mario/crapn_stuff.gif
http://www.homph.com/mario/firemarioluigi.gif
http://www.homph.com/mario/mario.gif
http://www.homph.com/mario/luigi.gif

oh hey this thread is really old 

A search here however...

The links are down 

It depends what  isWalkingLeft()  does. From its name it would look like it would only stopping the player from -walking- left. If you don't check for isWalkingLeft while in the air then that could be your problem right there.

If that's not it, do you have any sort of momentum, like if you let go, will the player keep going left or right? Seeing how you handle the part that actually moves the player might help.

Oh, yeah it's LCD. I guess I should go try it out for myself if I can find a non LCD in one of the labs here, thanks.

Nah, they're in the same thread. If you can't / won't look at the .jar in my first post I'm pretty sure that you won't be able to get what exactly is going on... I'll give you a screenshot so you can look at the background... it could just be the complexity of it that's making it look weird in motion.



mmh flying "cactuses"

It sort of looks like I should be able to get a screen shot of it, but despite my many attempts I just got clean pictures. I tried video capture but with both programs open at the same time it was too choppy to really show anything.

I believe you should use an offscreen buffer... I'm not too proficient, but I think I understand your question and this is what I use, so this should work :/     

I have a 2d side scroller, and it seems that when the background is dark / uncomplicated there is no problem. When I move to a brighter and more complicated background however, the scrolling seems weird. Either it's glitching or maybe it's just a bad choice for a background.

At the moment I'm updating by using Timer.scheduleAtFixedRate, which on it's own might be a bad way of doing things. The "problem" with the background got slightly better when I updated more often... but that won't fly because that slows everything else down ( I need two windows open while I can test the multiplayer aspects ) And even then it still looks too blury when in motion.

Anyhow you can take a look here: www.homph.com/VampireHack.jar

The background off to the right with the trees is what is bothering me... nevermind the flying inactive second player 

I could use that  

For your purposes flash or shockwave is definately the way to go.  

The ball seems to get stuck when trying to hop you're moving at a certain speed or something. Like, I can hop without a hitch when staying in one place, but sometimes it get stuck when trying to move at hop at the same time.  

Wow. My jaw just dropped at how awesome that worked. It took less than 2 minutes to fix it after I read that.  

This bug was such a headache I thought I might have to change all of my plans for the game around it. Many thanks.


Edit: nevermind, I seem to have the jar actually working now. I had the same errors as you it when it wasn't working.. so hopefully it would work now for you... does this .jar load properly?  http://www.ki-rush.com/enpitsu.jar

http://www.goldenstudios.or.id/products/GTGE/  

That? It looks like there is a ugly screen required at start up with an unsightly selection thing  there as well and... and... and... are you saying I should give up trying to handle this kind of stuff

Just make a small selection screen or something, and then use an if statment to decide which of the two games to run  

So I tried what you said jbanes, does it work now?  :-/

www.ki-rush.com/what.jar

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what to do... I wasn't loading files with "new FileInputStream()", I was loading them like this:



Hmm,  that might be the same thing... dunno  :-/  

In any case, is there a way to fix the problem you had that would also entail using a way to obtain file input one line at a time, rather than by bytes? I can't really figure out how to change everything to be loaded from bytes instead of just using .readLine() ...

Er.. and well currently I'm loading images like this:



and as far as I know, I thought that does load it from the url instead of creating a stream

Hehe, awesome little game, also it's kind of addictive  

I'm working on a tile based rpg, and I'm trying to make it look as professional as possible... I already can get smooth movement with scrolling, and I've got the character to the point where [on my system at least] if it keeps moving in one direction it will look fairly smooth, more or less thanks to you guys with the bits of code I've looked at off of here and some of the suggestions I've seen  

Anyhow so the problem is if you want to move in, let's say a different direction, it looks chopy/does't happen until the guy gets done moving. If you're at a complete stop then only try to move in one direction, it looks fine. Currently, the guy makes about 5 intervals during each directional key press, to make it look smooth. I've tried making the character just changing direction if there is a key press in between movement shifting, but this looks weird... I've tried looking at professional games, but it doesn't really help me out in seeing how they make the keyboard input/ensuing movement look so smooth.

I'd post code, but it looks a bit icky at the moment.

Ahh, and it seems i'm quite the noob with this .jar business... here is the game I'm working on. Unlike the .jars I've seen here that just work instantly, mine seems to work if you extract it, then put the jar in that folder you extracted the stuff to.  :-/    What.

www.ki-rush.com/what.jar


Oh, and sorry if I sucked at explaining what's going on, any feedback would be cool really.

A game that says "hello world"  :-/

How did you fix it? I've been having this problem