Play community-created games in a browser

[gumby]

Okay, I've imaged & zipped up all the AGI games w/dosbox config.  I removed older versions/demos of the same title and came up with a total of 152.  Now I just need to create webpages for each & run through them, make sure they all work.

[Collector]

anybody know of real good hosting, lol

I use Arvixe. It's been a good service. The package I have gives unlimited space and shy of 3000 gb bandwidth a month. All for about $40 a year plus $10 domain registration. SHP averages over 25,000 unique visitors a month and last month used over 170 gb bandwidth.

We were moved to another server because of some SQL errors that we were having that kept reoccurring. Bandwidth is not quite as good as on the old server. It is a shared server and I suspect that they put us on one that has another very busy site.

Even so, usually speed is reasonable, even with the occasional slowdown. It has only been down only once that I am aware of. It easily handles the jDOSBox code. Freddy Pharkas demo

[Cloudee1]

I haven't had time to monkey around with this anymore, but I did turn Collector's image of the Black Cauldron into an disk image of one of my in progress games. This is currently available for a little bit of online play testing.

I make the big formal speech later in the news section, but for now if you want to give a little sci-online a little try.

Might I suggest Shoot em up.  A word of warning, it plays slow... But it plays.

[gumby]

First level runs just fine I think...  level 2, a bit laggy but still playable.  I recognize the rope from level 4 

[Collector]

Amusing little shooter. Gumby's right, level 2 is a bit slow. Danoon just released a new version of jDOSBox that is faster.

New Beta Version build 19c

The new caching core is almost done. It runs all my standard test games, including, Death Rally, Doom, Tomb Raider and Dungeon Keeper. Currently the only problem is Windows 3.11.

On average this version should be about 2x faster than my previous official release.

Please test this version and report back any problems.

http://jdosbox.sourceforge.net/beta/jdosbox.jar

I think the load time is mostly due to the size of the jdosbox.jar. I could setup a sub domain for you to put some of the larger and more bandwidth things, say sciprogramming.sierrahelp.com, at least until you can get a better service.

I've been using WinImage to handle the disk images. I haven't tried Disk Explorer, so I am not sure about it, but at least in WinImage you can delete and rename files and folders inside the image. I find it good practice to use unique names for the folders, images and jars/zips for each game. By the time you get all of the games uploaded it will make it hard to keep track of them all.

I've been busy, too. I have been setting up my large collection of Sierra demos. I have made templates of empty disk images (of varying sizes in 5 MB increments) an empty JAR, batch file and an HTML page to speed things up. All I have to do is copy and rename the templates, edit the batch file, open the image in WinImage and drop the game's folder in with the edited batch file. I can then add the image into the jdos folder in the jar. All that is left at that point is to change names in the HTML file.

http://sierrahelp.com/jDOSBox/jDOSBox.html

[Cloudee1]

I actually used disk explorer to copy the new resource files I didn't bother trying to change the names at all. I'm going to a slightly diffrent direction to start off with, but I'll try to explain it when the link pops up. For now though I wanted to get something up and rolling. New jdosbox, twice as fast... sounds perfect. I pity anyone who makes it into the bank.

[gumby]

Okay, AGI games are coming along nicely.  I've got them all except for the NAGI games:

- Al Pond 1
- Apocalyptic quest
- Bob the Farmboy
- Enclosure
- Gennadi
- Hobbits
- Journey of Chef
- Open Mic Night
- Save Santa
- Space Quest 0
- Tales of the Tiki
- The Long Haired Dude
- V - The Graphical Adventure

I'm also having some problems with a handful of other games, sound/video issues crashing dosbox.

I'm changing the scope of this project.  I'm thinking I'll create an installation package that allows all games to be played both for web-hosted play and local pc play.  So I'll put together some nice webpages for displaying the games, etc.  Maybe some sorting by category (author, genre, PG rating).

I have to say that I was impressed with of the vast majority games (AGI & SCI) from what I saw.  Very nice.

[Cloudee1]

So are you just running the agi games through dosbox or have you looked into sarien at all. I suppose since I'm using a popup there's no reason that adding in agi support shouldn't go rather smoothly. And from what I've seen of sarien.net, it doesn't seem to suffer the lag that dosbox does. I've went from a full blown conf file to not using one at all without much change. Makes me wonder just how much is controllable.

[Collector]

I've went from a full blown conf file to not using one at all without much change. Makes me wonder just how much is controllable.

I have wondered, too. Some things it will accept, like aspect correction, but not machine=tandy. It also seems to ignore cycle and frame settings. I had to resort to the old GOSiERRA patcher for SB initialization errors because it ignored cycle settings.

I could see that he might not have Tandy support built in, but cycles is so basic that it is hard to believe he has ignored that.

[gumby]

Just today I created a generic applet html file for launching games.  Wish I'd done that from the beginning; I had put together a separate html file for each AGI & SCI game and now they are useless.

The good news is that that a webserver is not longer necessary, just a browser (and java) - I've eliminated all absolute urls.  So I've met my requirement of a package that can be downloadable & fully stand-alone, as well as a package that can be easily integrated into a website.

I'll be moving along to testing the sarien solution once I finish up the jDosBox stuff.

[Collector]

Hey gumby, did you register your JDK after installing? I wanted to experiment with the signed approach for some of the larger and more demanding demos. I followed the instructions to sign the jar and it seems to work, but it complains that it cannot verify it when launching it.

[gumby]

Hey gumby, did you register your JDK after installing? I wanted to experiment with the signed approach for some of the larger and more demanding demos. I followed the instructions to sign the jar and it seems to work, but it complains that it cannot verify it when launching it.

No, despite the fact that the jar is signed, the JVM cannot verify the signature.  You can check the box 'Always allow content from this provider' or whatever it says and it won't bother you again.  I think this is the same issue as a self-signed SSL certificate - unless you use a public on-line providers' signing method (e.g. Thawte) it will always be 'unverified'.

[gumby]

Okay, I'm finished.  All the games (except the NAGI ones) are playable either on-line or off-line (both from within a browser).  The archive consists of:

- An index page of all the games in a sortable html table, nothing fancy.
- A generic, parameterized page to launch jDosBox
- jDosBox itself, current stable version
- All games in 10 meg images, zipped up

The NAGI games are listed in the index, but are not playable.

The file is 30 meg, couldn't upload it.  Cloudee & Raf, PM me so I can get this to you guys - assuming you'd like to host it.  I guess I don't see a problem releasing the package for the community to download as well.

On to testing the sarien.net solution.

[gumby]

Lol. The Ruby Cast took me less than an hour (newbie fumbling & bumbling included) to get working in Sarien.net.  Let's see if it works with the NAGI games...

[gumby]

Okay.  I've found out that the sarien.net solution needs some work when it comes to the fan made games.  For sure, NAGI games just plain don't work - probably because sarien is a port of the original AGI interpreter, I'm guessing.  Anyway, here are my results:

AGI games
- The Ruby Cast: Works, but when you attempt to go 'out-of-bounds' toward the river, the warning dialog loops.
- Boring Man 1: Doesn't work, all you get is the parser input '>' and a black screen (perhaps mouse support not available?)
- Car Driver: Works, but car view doesn't change to the 'vertical' orientation.

NAGI games
- AGI Combat: Does nothing
- Hobbits:  Can get through the initial cutscene, but upon any keyboard input 'You are dead' & the game restarts
- Save Santa: Get intro splash screen, then javascript error

I can say that The Ruby Cast runs blazing fast compared to jDosBox.