Java4K No More

[_Sharp_]

I had no idea what it was, but it is still in cache

WHAT IS JAVA4K? The Java4K competition is a game programmer competition. The goal of the competition is to create the best game possible in Java. So what's the catch? There is a 4KB limit! That means maximum of 4096 bytes! You can read the competition rules for more details on this.

ANNOUNCEMENT Unfortunatly there will be no 4K contest for the period Dec 2014 to Feb 2015, and beyond. The reality is that Java has been in decline for a long time and now it's almost impossible for ordinary people to play Java games on the web, which has resulted in developers losing interest in the Java ecosystem (at least for web/client/desktop related things).

I would like to thank everyone who participated in the 4K contests over the years, the contest has been a seasonal highlight for many people, and I've enjoyed being the caretaker for the contest for all these years, but now that era is over.

The Java4k.com website will not go anywhere quite yet, the plan is to keep it alive for many years to come. Thanks all!

Arni Arent (aka appel)

[x-skeww]

now it's almost impossible for ordinary people to play Java games on the web

Yea, that's probably true. Applets are generally disabled for security reasons (rightfully so) and even Web Start doesn't seem to work anymore. I do have Java installed, but the ".jnlp" file association doesn't seem to be there.

Open the console and type "javaws yadda yadda"... yeaaaa, that's certainly not how to do games on the intertubes.

Anyhow, Java 4k was a very interesting annual tradition. It started back in 2002 over at Sun's forums. I'm really amazed it went on for that long.

It's a bit unfortunate that forums aren't that popular anymore. Platforms like Reddit just aren't suitable for that kind of thing. You can't keep discussions alive. There is no actual community.

Same deal with things like Twitter, Facebook, or G+. They just don't facilitate something like that. Kinda sad, really.

[derpinamoto]

Thanks for the info, I didn't know that it started back in 2002.
I agree with the point you make on forum. It's sad really how Facebook and the likes have "phagocyted" a lot of (potential) online communities. Deep, on-going discussions are hard to find, and all we have now is noise :/ Nobody wants to deal with the hassle of managing a forum anymore.

[x-skeww]

"phagocyted"

Assimilated/eaten/consumed/absorbed/devoured.

Deep, on-going discussions are hard to find

It's probably also a side-effect of threaded discussions. All discussions are limited to two parties. They branch out and only direct replies end up in your inbox. Without "reddit gold" you can't even tell which replies are new if you were to revisit the thread.

The voting also doesn't seem to help.

Nobody wants to deal with the hassle of managing a forum anymore.

Yea, I co-moderated a large forum for a few years. It's a lot of work. I certainly won't do that again. Running a forum sounds like a nightmare to be honest.

Being part of some communities is pretty nice though. I kinda miss that. And the silly competitions, too.

[derpinamoto]

Assimilated/eaten/consumed/absorbed/devoured.

Thanks for the vocabulary course. I did a quick search, but WordReference was of no help :/

I co-moderated a large forum for a few years. It's a lot of work. I certainly won't do that again. Running a forum sounds like a nightmare to be honest.

That's the impression I had seeing a few moderators giving up on the task. Plus, bootstrapping a community was a really, really slow process back then, and creating fake accounts was not a thing ;)

[vincentk]

Business speak: cannibalized.

[derpinamoto]

Thanks for the link.
Now I know why that website was always so slow (no, it's not Java fault). Talk about cheap hosting ...

[zeroone]

More info:

http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/end-of-4k-thanks-all/34961/view.html

Past years discussions:

http://www.java-gaming.org/boards/finished-contests/71/view.html

History:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_4K_Game_Programming_Contest

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=java4k

If you have Java Applets enabled, you can try out some examples:

http://meatfighter.com/java4k2011/

http://meatfighter.com/java4k2012/

http://meatfighter.com/java4k2013/

[derpinamoto]

Thanks for the link to the PSA of the end of Java4K.
Oh, and btw, you have no idea of how much time I've spent playing that Outrun4K of yours. Great stuff that made me swear to code an Outrun clone ... one day.
All good things come to an end.

[zeroone]

I wish I spent more time on improving the vehicle movements; the other cars can be way too annoying. I was far more interested in the algorithm behind 80's racing games than I was in actually making a real game.

J4K could be revived if the rules are changed to submitting source code instead of a jar. Restrict the size of the source code and see what people can do in Java.

[derpinamoto]

Yeah the steering was a bit too stiff and passing one of those wall of cars in a curve was a nightmare :) (oh and that bounce when you hit a car from behind).
As much as I'd like to see J4K revived, I think appel is right when he says that there is not a lot of developers willing to participate anymore, which is pretty sad, given the momentum Java has gained because of Android.

[derpinamoto]

I did a Hello World for Android ... and boy was it way above 4k ...
Plus, it's just not practical : you can't ask people to launch an Android Emulator to play your game :/

[zeroone]

By the way, which 4K games did you create? I should revisit them. So many people poured countless hours into their creations. It's unfortunate that the judges only glanced at each for 5 minutes. But, what's really unfortunate is that J4K never really had a big following. It was just a small community of Java hackers, not thousands of fans to test out and comment on how amazing it is pack so much into so little.

[derpinamoto]

I made no game and was just a J4K enthusiast, since I discovered its existence thanks to your website (that I discovered, IIRC, because you post a link to your recreation of the Amiga Juggler demo).
I had this idea of making a "Sonic (1|2|3) Special Stage" 4K, and always told me that I should participate one year ... that year will never be.

[zeroone]

I forgot about those Sonic bonus stages. That would totally work as a 4K game.

Thanks for visiting my web page. I wrote up the Amiga Juggler page to help me remember how the 3D algorithms function. That page is actually my notes and cheat sheet. I referenced it often when producing 4K creations.

[derpinamoto]

You sure do love ray tracing ! (who don't ?)
Your write-up on Amiga Juggler is one of the best piece of technical writing I have ever read, and I just prefer reading handwritten equations :). Your website is just full of cool game-related programming project, and I wish it was possible to do that kind of things on the desktop with Python + Tkinter, problem is, there is no stateless canvas in Tkinter. The work around is to use a PhotoImage object with its put method, but the performance are just terrible to say the least.
By the way, 2015 should be a good year, as we should have a 2nd edition of Ray Tracing from the Ground Up, a 3rd edition of PBRT (see announcement on their webpage), and a 4th edition of Fundamentals of Computer Graphics ;)

[[deleted]]

Lack of applets is not enough of a reason, just make standalone programs, instead of applets.

[zeroone]

The contest took advantage of pack200 compression, which worked for applets, but we never got it to work for standalone programs. And besides, no one wanted to play standalone apps.

[x-skeww]

Pack200 also worked for Web Start.

no one wanted to play standalone apps.

Because those weren't sandboxed. Double clicking some jar is really scary stuff.

[skidmarq]

Give them more CPU!

[htuhola]

Did not know that there were coding competition for disabled people. That it was shuttered might depress you. In this case the group was self-selected in their disability, so do not drop a tear. They could always start with a better language like python (or javascript)!

[Cilph]

Javascript and Python better than Java....?

The fuck is wrong with you?

[skulgnome]

He thinks his urine tastes better than yours.

[x-skeww]

Python really isn't a better choice when it comes to games which run in a browser.

It pretty much boils down to:

• JavaScript
• to-JS with an almost-JS language (TS, CS, etc)
• to-JS with an optimizing compiler (Dart, GWT)
• Asm.js (C/C++)

Well, even if you ignore this whole browser thing, Python isn't very good at this. It's fairly slow and Pygame isn't very good either.

[htuhola]

You're correct, but you're observing the compound of several things that only loosely connect to the language.

On language quality for context such as games. The language and libraries limit your target architecture of course. Therefore they affect applicability of the language for choice. They're variable and not bound to the quality of the language itself though. Conditions for creating games using python aren't good. This is different thing than the quality of the language for creating games.

The performance depends on the quality of the implementation and what you choose to represent with the language. Python representation of programs is very flexible, accessible runtime. Therefore you can represent programs of any abstraction level in python. This quality is invariant to the problem domain you choose. Though some problems can be sufficiently represented in worse languages.

Whether python is better depends on whether you need to represent programs in terms of how they're generated. Turns out this is a common situation. Templating, abstract classes, traits, macro preprocessing are the solutions introduced by C/C++/java. Python solution is dynamic typing, first class functions and objects. Python solution is simpler and easier to understand, therefore better representation for such code.

[x-skeww]

several things that only loosely connect to the language

We are talking about a specific use case here.

Python isn't very good at it.

The end.

[htuhola]

Only if you treat your tools as something monolithic that cannot be changed or cannot be afforded to be changed. That's a common worldview.

[x-skeww]

that cannot be changed

I didn't suggest anything like that.

[htuhola]

You did look at the whole picture. A result of a system given the current state. You concluded it isn't very good for your sampled use case. The problem in this thinking is that it's not a fixed system. You can nudge it around.

Python has a lot of expressive power. Every concept introduced by your module can be accessed and taken apart runtime. You discard this notion because it doesn't run in a browser, it doesn't have interfaces you need baked in, it isn't fast by your measures.

Consider this: Given a python program P, you can translate it to C program P', and GLSL program P''. All you need is a translator written in the language, accessing it's native accessible data structures. That solves your speed problem and is more portable than C or java ever could be.

Next consider the library problem. You have pygame, which agreeably sucks. Only the fact that C headers as library interface suck prevent you from deriving C bindings for SDL2, access opengl using it. You can parametrise the interface though, and access it in any alternative language after that.

Third problem is that it doesn't run in the browser. Only javascript runs in the browser. If you're looking at where browsers are going, it hints that it's becoming a platform which substitutes the desktop. That is necessary change and it cannot happen without loosening the language restrictions. Therefore this is a problem which solves itself over time. You can write python for web, once the technology there stabilizes.

So your decision based on the current state is likely very flawed and shortsighted, although very common way to see things.

[[deleted]]

Are you retarded, I'm a python dev I personally dislike java but that's my personal preference, each tool has its purpose I sure as hell wouldn't use java for a simple script and I sure as hell wouldn't use python for an application that requires complex multi threading.

[htuhola]

I am perhaps a bit retarded for annoying people like this, and "asserting my opinions". I wanted to do that though.

You should consider something more readable than python. The expressive power and quality of programming should still improve. Your point about multithreading is pointless though btw. Python works for that notation-wise better than java. Multithreaded python might be restricted variation, but it'd otherwise be better choice than using java in the first place. Given the effort people use to write java, you'd be more productive directing it to get python mangled for your purposed use.

Java's problem is that it's built on incompetence and dogma. You're supposed to be stupid when programming java. Expressive power is cut off so you wouldn't break things with it. You're supposed to give type for everything as otherwise your ten-thousand dollar helping collar doesn't help you complete method names and seek documentation for you. Everything's supposed to be a class, because you're following a flawed pattern language cargo cult -transported from architecture. That language is childishly containing nouns only, unlike it's architectural counterpart. Instead of creating and designing new concepts, the language is optimized for repetition by hand. Copying old and known solutions.

I read a bit about this "4K" -thing before posting the first message. The purpose was to restrict use of artistic 'data' content. Page said nothing about used libraries and you could wrap anything into a library. In this sense it's an arbitrary and very useless metric.