Jangaron - new browser-based lightcycle game

[Tank Program]

That is awesome. What are the odds of playing full screen against an AI?

One more thing concerning full screen: Most browsers support a full screen or "kiosk" mode! In Firefox, you should first switch off all tool bars - IE takes care of this automatically in full screen mode. In both browsers, F11 does the job, and voila: full screen Jangaron! I could find no performance impact whatsoever, since the JavaScript part is the limiting factor, not the browser drawing code which is highly optimized.

I should clarify what I meant. I didn't mean full screen in that way. I meant it in that it's just you and an AI, instead of the top one player and the bottom another. It's very rare that I get the chance to sit at my computer, open a browser, and want to play tron first person against them like this.

[wrtlprnft]

Quadruple post FTL; next time use the button .

SCNR

[Jangaroo]

That is awesome. What are the odds of playing full screen against an AI?

One more thing concerning full screen: Most browsers support a full screen or "kiosk" mode..

I should clarify what I meant. I didn't mean full screen in that way. I meant it in that it's just you and an AI, instead of the top one player and the bottom another. It's very rare that I get the chance to sit at my computer, open a browser, and want to play tron first person against them like this.

Tank, I hope I answered that aspect in my first reply. Just wanted to add the remark about the full screen mode, since this is a browser feature that I myself rarely use for surfing, so I thought maybe others had not thought about using that feature, too. For the game, however, it makes quite a difference - it looks even more like a "real" game!

[HellBlade]

could you set acceleration to be a constant when you press and hold 'up arrow' because having to repeatedly press the up arrow is quite annoying.

[Jangaroo]

could you set acceleration to be a constant when you press and hold 'up arrow' because having to repeatedly press the up arrow is quite annoying.

Good point, HellBlade. Rather than using onkeydown only, the light cycle should keep accelerating until the keyup event arrives. However, my local "key repeat" settings seems to take care of that: If I hold down the up arrow, the light cycle keeps accelerating. This is why I did not notice the problem myself!

[Jangaroo]

Hi again,

thanks again for all the feed-back! To prove that I took it seriously, I have updated Jangaron and made it available on my Web-space:
http://home.arcor.de/frank.wienberg/
The new features are:

• * The game now runs on FF2, IE7, Safari 3, and Opera 9 (slowly). Feel free to test Konqueror!
  * Added an intro screen with some information about the game, most importantly the control key reference.
  * Accelerating and breaking now works by keeping the keys held down.
  * The walls now have a white border, which looks more fancy and quite like in the movie.
  * The light cycles start at slow speed and accelerate to the minimum speed of 25 units/s.
  * Optimized the graphics speed, especially when there are a lot of walls.

[Tank Program]

Looks pretty good. It might be better to restart both cycles on one's death because otherwise you can put a wall right in front of the spawn and pretty much lock down the other player's ability to do anything.

[Jangaroo]

Looks pretty good. It might be better to restart both cycles on one's death because otherwise you can put a wall right in front of the spawn and pretty much lock down the other player's ability to do anything.

Yeah, I did not yet address that issue. The main reason why I let the game continue is because in a two player game, the game would restart after each crash. If the game had more than two players (say, some AI players), it would restart only after all human players have crashed. I feel that for the surviving player, not restarting the game gives more continuity and avoids a "kamikaze" strategy. To achieve the latter, the game should at least continue a few seconds after the crashed player has vanished, so the surviving player has to prove that he still has control of the situation.

Even better would of course be to implement AI players and/or network play, so that the game could be player three-on-three like in the movie... I should really have a look at your network and AI player code and see if I can port it to my game!

[doublet]

Hi Jangaroo,

sounds interesting - is there already a Website available for this project?

/Tilo

[Jangaroo]

Hi Jangaroo,

sounds interesting - is there already a Website available for this project?

/Tilo

Hi Tilo,

only the game itself is online right now (see previous post).
The code is written in a language called Jangaroo (that's why the game is called Jangaron) which is very similar to the upcoming JavaScript 2 / ECMAScript 4 and can be compiled to JavaScript 1.x. The steps towards an open source Jangaron are:

• * Build a home page for the Jangaroo language and make the Jangaroo compiler and tools open source.
  * Create an open source project for Jangaron, including a home page, a blog, a forum, ...

Step one can only be accomplished together with the company I work for, because the compiler was developed there, but I push this process forwards as fast as I can. As soon as the tools are open source, everyone is invited to help me making Jangaron an open source project, since I own the Jangaron code and thus can decide to make it public.

[Jangaroo]

Hi again,

it took me quite a while, but now there is a new Jangaron version online at http://home.arcor.de/frank.wienberg/jangaron.html.
The game now features a settings UI where you can configure up to six players, where up to four can be "users" and all others "programs" (AI players!). The programs are really stupid ("turn if going straight would crash you into a wall"), but at least make the game more vivid. After only one human player remains, the game is now restarted (like Tank suggested) and statistics are kept about how often somebody has won and died.
Another setting is to render all wall slightly transparent, which looks pretty cool, but slows down the game when there are a lot of walls, since all walls have to be rendered. You can also add some obstacle walls to the game grid.
Finally, I started a blog about the Jangaron, which by now only contains a welcome entry with a link to the game. If you like the game and want to stay up to date, please refer to the blog from now on! I would be happy about comments, trackbacks, diggs, ...!
http://jangaron.blogspot.com

[Jangaroo]

Btw., I also started a thread dedicated to Jangaron over at Tron-Sector:
http://www.tron-sector.com/forums/defau ... &id=359999

[Jangaroo]

Hi,

just to let you know: Jangaron has been updated to version 0.43!
Read about the improvements and new features in the blog or go directly to the game site! As always, I'd appreciate any feed-back.
Have fun,

[Tank Program]

Looks really cool, but it seems like the AI can turn much faster than you can. Starting in the middle of three also makes it very difficult. About all you can do is turn around and go out the back.

[wrtlprnft]

Or accelerate as quickly as you can and turn right at precisely the correct moment.