Box2D Forums

Check out Pelter (it's a Java applet, so it might hang for a bit while it loads, unless you're already using a beta of the 6u10 "consumer" JRE, which should make applets behave nicely, finally!)

Background: This is the first entry in a competition my brothers (three of them) and I are having amongst ourselves. The topic was to make a game using JBox2d and Pulpcore based on the game Crossfire. If you don't remember that game, you might remember the commercial in all its 80s-tastic glory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwn1NTK-50

The other entries will show up soon, hopefully (Will is the only non-slacker, which means by default he is the winner, for now - this was due last Monday!). I warn you, Will is a bit of a sadist when it comes to difficulty, so this is a tough game. I suck at it, maybe you'll do better...

Source should be available soon for this, also, as soon as we get our website stuff together.

That's pretty slick. You aren't exaggerating when you say it's tough. The CPU player racked up a score well into the double digits before I could even score a point (entirely by accident).

I was initially a bit confused because I was thinking of an entirely different Crossfire until I watched the commercial. I remember that ad...

Nice use of physics!

It's very nice. I didn't find the computer to be that insanely good but it's very hard to beat it.

I noticed a lot of objects being spawned inside other objects though. Caused them to not respond to being hit by things. Otherwise, an excellent game.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's working on fixing that - apparently he ran into some problems getting the hit detection in Pulpcore to work, but it's on his to-do list, at least.

Best Box2d game i've seen!
Including mine! .. skillroll.com
Is it me or does it seem to be much faster and smoother than
the flash version? I've never tried so many objects before but
It seems like it would be much slower in the as3 version?
Do you think that's true?
Mike

It's probably a bit faster - as long as you don't have too much stuff going on, you can usually get a full 60 fps in Java applets now. David Brackeen (the guy that manages the Pulpcore framework) has an almost magical touch when it comes to making his library squeeze as much speed as possible out of Java - graphics are rarely the bottleneck with that framework, since he handles all that fun stuff like dirty rectangles within the engine. Also, the Java Virtual Machine, despite its reputation for slowness, has actually gotten quite good over the past few versions, and makes most local optimizations unnecessary (the usual things like pulling constant factors outside of loops, etc., really don't help at all because the virtual machine already looks for that stuff anyways), which helps a lot.

Flash should get there, eventually, it just takes a long time for an interpreted language to evolve into a fast JIT-compiled language; Flash has at least gotten to the JIT part, now they just need to clean it up and optimize. Right now, I think it's usually graphics that slows things down, since you're always running through their way-too-feature-complete graphics framework even if you just want to do simple things.

At least until the latest builds of Java 6, Flash still destroys Java as a browser plugin, though. Nobody wants to risk browser crashes and sit through a 30 sec JVM startup while waiting for a game to load, and that's why most big game sites on the web won't even think of putting up Java games.

Glad you liked the game, I'll let my brother know it's been well received!

Very nice game!! Now we need the multiplayer version!!

Congratulations ewjordan, you've made a fine port of Box2D

Just to be clear to anyone that arrived late to the party, quixote_arg did a fantastic amount of work porting of Box2d to Java, without which JBox2d wouldn't even exist - I've been keeping it up to date for a while, but if there's credit (or blame - hopefully not!) to be passed around, a huge part of it goes to him!

Re: multiplayer networking, yeah, that would be a dream. One of these days, I keep saying, but it's a pretty big effort, and at the moment I don't even have a server that I could use it on (NearlyFreeSpeech doesn't allow game servers, or even Java at all, for that matter). So we'll see...yeah, that would be great, though!

It's not java but it still might be useful to anyone that's interested.
http://nonoba.com/developers/multiplayerapi/overview

That would be interesting to see how a flash version of the game
compares in speed.

Mike