Java 4K Game Development Contest

mrseigen writes "Java Unlimited has been running a contest since Dec 1 to develop a game in Java using only four kilobytes of bytecode and resources. You have until March 1 to finish your entries, and it's worth looking at the entries for last years' contest."

So who won last year's contest?

[Therin]

I looked around the site linked, and while they have 50 games archived from last year, there is no mention I can find of who won.

Anyone know where that is?

SCREENSHOTS

[Eightyford]

Everybody loves screenshots... [javaunlimited.net]

Re:So who won last year's contest?

[Bibz]

I don't know exactly who won, but you could go with the number of downloads to judge the "best" game.

This would mean that Dungeon 4K would have won. It has far more DLs than any other game (1600 compared to 900 to the second "best")

Re:So who won last year's contest?

[AKAImBatman]

http://games.datadino.com/4K_2005/scores.html [datadino.com]

Be nice to the poor server, please.

Re:Useful...

[AKAImBatman]

It does have real use for Cell Phones and other J2ME devices. The types of tricks used in this contest are precisely the types of things you'd do for J2ME. The only difference is that J2ME further constrains you on total system memory, not just download size.

Re:New Demo Scene?

[AKAImBatman]

Having moved to the Mac a few years back, I haven't found many demos which run natively on my machine.

Try Robotron 4096. It was developed on a Mac, then tested on Windows. ;-)

Is this a sign the demo scene may just kick off big time for J2SE?

This contest is currently running into its fourth year. It garnered quite a bit of attention the first year, but the quality of the entries was pretty low. The second year two competitors really tore up the contest with full graphics, sound support, and full screen applications. The third year gained attention from many professional game developers. taking the contest into 3D, real-time raytracing, and other areas that it had never been before.

The fourth year is shaping up to be even bigger and badder than ever before. Visit JavaGaming.org [javagaming.org] for more info.

4k?

[PeterAllen]

Anyone know what happened to the 5k? used to live at http://the5k.org/ [the5k.org]

Re:About what you would expect

[AKAImBatman]

One 4K version of tetris on that page uses almost 40 MB of RAM after a few minutes

Did you consider that the memory you're seeing may be JVM overhead combined with pre-allocation? In smaller devices (like Cell Phones), the JVM is built into the device. So there's no real overhead for Java. The pre-allocation is also smaller to compensate for the smaller device. Considering that many of these devices have barely 64K available (never mind 120K), I'd say that Java fits just fine.

and after playing for a while there's occasional, noticeable pauses for garbage collection (yes, I verified it was from garbage collection)

I find it interesting that you singled out such an example without looking at many of the more interesting examples like T4XI, Robotron 4096, and Hunters 4K. Also, you may find Tetris 4K to be a much better version than the first item on the list.

Java's great for some tasks, it's almost like a cross-platform VB. But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.

You don't [wurmonline.com] know [puppygames.net] what [bytonic.de] you're [mycgiserver.com] talking [datadino.com] about [getjar.com].

At one point I could have pointed to the poor performance and massive memory usage of VegaStrike [sourceforge.net]. Does that mean that C/C++ is a "bad" langauge? NO! It means that it was poorly coded and still needed lots of work done. The developers worked on improving their codebase, and low-and-behold, the game got better. Perhaps it wasn't the language after all?