Archive for October 2006
Java 3D will be continue past where Real Time 3D left off. Right now you can check out a quick and dirty translation of Wolf5K which was originally written in Javascript. The Java version just gets you going moving around and rendering walls and objects. There’s no game logic. I’m going to skip that for now and move on to enhancing the rendering and making it more efficient. We’ll get back to game logic later.
I’ve done real time software rendering in JavaScript, PHP and C++ and now will continue with Java. There are a number of reasons for the move. One is that I need to learn Java for school and I might as well do something interesting to learn it. Another is that Java apps are easily inserted into web-pages. The Javascript tutorials no longer work thanks to FireFox having a broken cache and every other browser I’ve tried not supporting the XBM format.
The first demo which just renders static can render 640×480 at 13 frames per second on a 1.74Ghz Sempron. Looking back on the C++ tutorials I was able to run the original translation of Wolf 5K at 8 frames per second at 640×480. Doing the math I would expect a 1.74Ghz machine to be able to run it at about 11 frames per second. So it’s a toss up at this point whether C++ or Java can do it better.
The final reason for using Java is that the compiler and a very good IDE (Eclipse) are entirely free. This will make it easy for visitors to easily see the code in action, download it and tweak it on their own. That was the goal with Javascript and until recently it worked well.
I don’t know when the Java clone of Wolf 5K will be available but it’s definitly a project I’ll be working on as time permits.
I decided to throw up a proxy for the heck of it. We’ll see if it gets used at all.
Indie-Mobile has been revamped yet again. I have such a huge collection of MIDI files that I’ve decided to organize them by the MD5 of the file contents. This does great for removing duplicate files and finding files which are the same but have a different file name. But, it doesn’t do well for browsing to find what you’re looking for. Since Free Ringtone Heaven takes the directory based approach I’ve decied to use the search based approach for Indie-Mobile. You can browse still but there are only three levels of directories and they are one character each. The search bar is on every page because that’s really how it’s designed to be used. Rather than trying to figure out my organization of all the files you can simply type the title or artist or whatever into the search and you’ll probably find it if I have it.
In the furture I’m planning to allow midi files to be uploaded and they’ll automatically be sorted and indexed. Right now there are 77,000+ MIDI files on Indie-Mobile. It’s still loading them all in so I’m not sure how many are copyrighted and/or unique. Typically only about 70% of the MIDI files end up being unique and downloadable.