Well, the SonicRacer4k thing mutated into a voxel cave engine that got stuck at 3KB sans gameplay, and I forgot to save the sourecode for just the racer, so I started over with something new.

My main goals where to both make something that looks good, and to make something that's actually PLAYABLE. This is supposed to be a GAME competition after all, not just a fancy technology competition.

Screenshots:

   

Webpage: (with jnlp, instructions, and more screenshots)

http://www.mojang.com/j4k/dungeon4k/

Whoa! Really Nice!

Can you say winner

Kev

Very amasing   I agree with Kev, I think that we already have a winner. Are you planning to release the source code?

I wasn't expecting to win, but I was hoping that my Robotron 4096 would at least have a fighting chance! Thanks alot Markus. :-/ ;-)

Actually, I'm quite impressed. You did a good job. Particularly impressive is the apparent lack of prerendered pixmaps. Would I be correct if I assumed that the textures are generated from a random noise generator plus a few line drawing algorithms? Also, if I'm not mistaken, there's no 3D math being done here. Rather the walls are linearly scaled to match their precise 2D distance from the player.

The addition of lighting is particularly nice. Is that done with a palette, or do you modify the individual pixels? Also, is the map autogenerated, or is it actually stored somewhere?

Anyway, a few comments:

1. You might want to change the name in the JNLP file to "Dungeon 4K" instead of "SonicRacer4K".

2. How about an executable manifest for the download version? You seem to have the space.

3. I'm on my Mac right now. When it goes into full screen, only a small portion of the screen is used. Is this correct?

4. How does the Pull spell work? When I try to pull one of the spheres, it seems to just stay where it is.

In any case, very nice job! It should fare well in the competition! :-)

Whee! =D
I'm glad you like it. I almost went nuts finishing it last night. I was at 3.8kb with no actual gameplay yet, and a few strange bugs. (You could sidestep through doors!)


jbanes:

0. All the graphics (except the key, which is a hack) are procedural. So is the map. It initially had a hand-made 16x16 map that was a bit more fun to play, but it just felt too small.

1. Hah, oops. Thanks, I fixed it. =)

2. The jar is 4096 bytes at the moment.. I'll try.

3. No, it's supposed to run 320x240 pixels fullscreen. Mh.

4. Stand in front of the sphere you want to pull, then back up one step and press p. It costs 10 energy to cast that spell, though.


As for the sourcecode, I'll post that once it's done. Hopefully it could inspire someone to make a proper dungeon master clone applet.

I can only speak for myself, but it's a lot of bad code and angst. =/

You should make a 4k alien flux. =D

PS: I wrote a real-time raytraced DM clone some years back with free movement, and some funky stuff like slightly exaggerated perspective (so that walls have a slight curve to them, which makes them look more realistic, but is a PITA to do if you're using traditional triangle rendering) and funkier lighting (because it's easy to do once you're already raytracing).

If someone (I'm guessing Markus, like me, has nowhere near enough spare time given his other projects) wants to start a "modernised" DM clone suggest doing raytracing for it to give it a unique new feel...it's really immersive having realistic lighting. Although I never got further than trivial AD&D combat with boxes (didn't get as far as adding sprites for monsters ) and only had it in black and white, you could get very far these days using pure procedural textures and lighting, doing all rendering in software (and without those boring triangle renderers )

You know, for something like Dungeon Master, Perlin Style Procedural Textures are really sufficient. Adding actual raytracing would be an unnecessary overkill. i.e. Since you're stuck to a limited number of moves and directions to face, the 3D coordinates become stupidly simple to compute. Once you have those coordinates, you just plug them into the procedural texture generator and out pops a perspective texture. Raytracing is far more useful for complex surfaces with surface coordinates that are difficult to predict. :-)

Ah, I see. Neat! So were you actually doing Ray Tracing, or were you using an advanced Ray Caster? I really can't see a Ray Tracer being efficient enough without some SERIOUS optimizations. Not that it isn't possible, just a bit tricky.  ;-)



Indeed. In many ways I think Chris Roberts and the rest of the Origin team were the original masters of PC Game Programming. The only reason why Ultima didn't get its due was because it was an RPG. And RPGs of the time tended to appeal to only a small subset of Players. The titles that got away from that (e.g. Wing Commander) showed extreme success and popularity. Now if Origin had only known how to make money off of that popularity...

An interesting factoid is that Ultima Underworld was produced by Looking Glass Studios, the same people who produced such cool titles as Flight Unlimited, Terra Nova, and System Shock. They really had a history of producing innovative gameplay technologies. Sadly, they were only slightly better than Origin on capitalizing on those technologies.

Um, IIRC it was, technically, rayCASTing, since it didn't do each pixel, it did each vertical column of pixels using one cast, and then algorithmically (ignoring perspective now) worked out what to paint inside the column.

It was full of *cheap tricks* because performance did matter, a bit, on java 1.2, so I'm glad the source is nowhere publically visible (I've lost it). The code probably looked horrible.

Still, it was easy to do, and it was really nice wandering around with decent lighting and curving walls.

</threadjack>

PS: don't knock 360 movement in an RPG untl you've tried it; I mentoined it precisely because it's a lot nicer than I would have tghought until I actually had an example to fiddle with.

Hmm it looks pretty, but I can't figure out what's going on...  I think I'd prefer A and D to turn and Q and E to strafe also

It uses the original DM controls. =)
(well, mapped to the left side of the kb as well for comfort)


blahblahblahh:
I'm just saying that with 360 motion and nice graphics, you might as well make a morrowind instead of a dungeon master.
Or, you know, a wurm.