[NTLK] Asteroids and WaGo

From: Sean Luke (seanl_at_cs.umd.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 17:00:47 EDT


I have posted two finished but highly unoptimized Waba games to my temp
directory. The games come with complete source, but please do not
distribute them at this point outside the Newton community, as I've not
attached the full licensing information to them per the requirements of
their original sources. I'm posting them now in the hopes that other
people might get interested in improving them and speeding them up (I
don't have enough time right now). Both are Waba-derived versions of Java
applets available on the web (and I have some ideas for other applets too.
:-)

Asteroids http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~sean/temp/asteroids.sit
                Original applet: http://www.alcoholismhelp.com/help/asteroids/javaroids.html
        A Waba asteroids program, very slow, but it has a lot of promise.
        I've already sped it up 3 times its initial speed just today
        with some minor mods, and I have some ideas about speeding it up
        further. It also has an input interface which might be gently
        described as "pre-alpha" :-). The keys
        are s=start, p=pause, space=fire, left=left, right=right,
        up=thrust, h=hyperspace I think. Asteroids tickles a bug
        in Waba I hadn't noticed: the hardware up key doesn't work (oops).
        And you'll need both the Controls and the on-screen keyboard to
        move it around for now :-). If you'd like to work on this program
        and get it faster and with a better interface, contact me and we
        can brainstorm about optimization.

WaGo http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~sean/temp/wago.sit
                Original applet: http://members.nbci.com/fmwang/
        Finally, a Go program for the Newton! But very slow. Part of
        this is the absolutely atrocious coding procedures of the original
        programmer; there's undoubtedly lots of stuff that can be sped
        up, though I'd have to give it a good look-through to determine
        exactly what the problems are, and probably hit it with a profiler
        too. I've got it hard-coded for a 13x13 board; it also does
        19x19 and 9x9 perfectly, and various window sizes perfectly, though
        that's not what you're getting right now. If it decides it
        needs to do a specific module before moving, it'll take up to
        10 seconds or more for a move. Other moves take about 2
        secs. That's on an MP2x00, I don't even want to think about the
        speed on an MP1x0 or eMate. Fixing the code is further hampered
        by the fact that even though it's supposedly under GNU release,
        I couldn't find the source anywhere, so I had to apply a
        decompiler to the .class files of the applet. It did a great
        job, though the function parameter names and local variable names
        are just stuff like i1, i2, ... etc.

Sean

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