Futuristic Arenas (web applet Java 1.1)

[ben]

Hi all,

I have recently finished "Futuristic Arenas" an applet based First Person Shooter. I would appreciate any feedback anyone might care to offer (feedback from Ancient Arenas was very useful and greatly appreciated).

This game uses the same (slightly tweaked) core engine as Ancient Arenas, but features new weapons, levels (much less orthogonal in design), special effects, slightly tweaked AI, etc...

Additionally, there is a somewhat experimental "Mouse Look " option available, please activate it from within the "Options" menu (you can also set mouse sensitivity here).

Here is the link : http://63.246.153.52/futuristicarenas/medium.html .

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to play around with it. Hope you enjoy it!

Ben.

PS - Here are some screenshots :

[bert]

Very cool, however I got blown away by too many people. (Perhaps it could be my slow computer?) But seriously though, nice work.

[BloodRain]

Nice game. I played this before.It would be a lot faster if compiled with a newer version of java .

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[Markus_Persson]

If you've got java 1.4 installed, it IS compiled with a faster version of java.
Besides, I doubt he's using the java 1.1 javac to compile the bytecode.


Nice game, by the way. A bit hard to make out what's going on sometimes, but that might be because of my high desktop resolution. I like the railgun. =)

[CommanderKeith]

Wow, nice work.  I rarely see such a good 3D shooter applet.

Why don't you set the mouse cursor to invisible & use java.awt.Robot to centre it so we don't click outside of the applet?  Is it because Robot runs outside of the sandbox?

I can't play it without mouse look but its very un-intuitive having the cursor on the screen but not aiming at it.  Also, the way you can unfocus the applet when shooting/clicking outside of the applet is annoying. 

Maybe to get around those problems you should webstart it & use Robot, because its a great game! 

Keith

[g666]

I found it quite fun with the arrow keys for turning, but i think it would be much better with a conventional mouselook.

[ben]

Wow, nice work.  I rarely see such a good 3D shooter applet.

Why don't you set the mouse cursor to invisible & use java.awt.Robot to centre it so we don't click outside of the applet?  Is it because Robot runs outside of the sandbox?

I can't play it without mouse look but its very un-intuitive having the cursor on the screen but not aiming at it.  Also, the way you can unfocus the applet when shooting/clicking outside of the applet is annoying. 

Maybe to get around those problems you should webstart it & use Robot, because its a great game! 

Keith

Thanks for the feedback. 

Yes, it is mainly the sandbox issue that stopped me from using Robot, that, and also wanting to remain compatible with Java 1.1. I believe Robot requires at least Java 1.3, and I am not really keen on forcing the user to potentially need to download a new JVM to play.

Although I am tempted to play around with it to see how much of a difference to playablility it makes, I realise the current mouselook restrictions are less than ideal.

Ben.

[ben]

I found it quite fun with the arrow keys for turning, but i think it would be much better with a conventional mouselook.

Yes, I agree, but that is the price to pay for backwards compatibility.

Ben.

[ben]

If you've got java 1.4 installed, it IS compiled with a faster version of java.
Besides, I doubt he's using the java 1.1 javac to compile the bytecode.

True

Nice game, by the way. A bit hard to make out what's going on sometimes, but that might be because of my high desktop resolution. I like the railgun. =)

I guess that the game can appear quite small if you have a very high res desktop setup. The game can run with larger screen sizes, of course, but you need a pretty fast machine to run it on anything higher than 800x600 (unless  you switch the renderer into low-detail mode).

The railgun is my fav too.

Ben.

[ben]

Very cool, however I got blown away by too many people. (Perhaps it could be my slow computer?) But seriously though, nice work.

Thanks.

Practice makes perfect!

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[Jamison]

Very cool game ben. But like other people have suggested, it would look much better in fullscreen with the mouse look. I had to change my resolution to 640x480 to be able to see anything because it was so dark. But I have problems like that with other games that don't have a brightness control (640x480, on my monitor, is considerably brighter than any other). Anywho, the game ran at a farely good frame rate throughout the game. There were some times in which it slowed down (especially when I walked right past a dead body). At 640x480, I couldn't see the whole screen, even if I put my browser in Fullscreen (the menubar and taskbar was still visible though). My PC specs are this:
CPU: 2GHz
RAM: 1GB
OS: Windows XP
Browser: Firefox v1.5.0.7
Java Version: 1.5.0_06
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256MB

[heyo]

looks really nice

[sjsayers]

I think mouse support was added if you look into the options