pieffe

Some people start working at projects for the new compo at the end of the previous one. The last one ended only six month ago, and this may be a reason of a low participation. Another reason is that some people (me, at least) have more free time during the Summer than in every other time of the year. But probably the main reason, IMO, is the new 8k category. I guess that many people are writing a 8k game instead of a 4k or 1k one.

I guess that was the first year (2001). When I started competing in 2002 I didn't notice that. Anyway, even if I believe that all competitors don't have this kind of hype, among voters there are still some. I know a few of them in the spectrum community, for example.

First of all, I don't think that many voters for 2005 compo didn't know that a version of 4k race refueled has been submitted the previous year. It has been mentioned in the forum, and I mentioned the previous version in both the game description and readme file. I actually suspect, also by looking at the comments, that the highest votes that I got are from Spectrum users, who knew that (also for the CSS crap compo), and who did appreciate the difficulty of implementing a fast scaling routine on the Spectrum. Anyway, I noticed that many of you take voting more seriously than I do. In my opinion, the minigame compo should be more a parade of games than a compo. The fact that it is actually a compo, and expecially allowing everybody to vote brings more people to see the games. As a similar example, the most famous Italian music festival is a competition with a winner. Well, the songs that sell the most are never the ones in the first three positions (I vaguely remember who won last year, and I don't remember who won two years ago.) Still, singers participate because it is a unique opportunity to present their work. EDIT: If it can make resubmissions over the years more acceptable, it is perfectly fine to me to require a complete list of changes by the authors of the games. This should allow a better judging.

A discussion started in the middle of web page http://minigamecomp.org.uk/index.php?name=...er=asc&start=30 but it didn't continue. Let me repeat that we assembled the new version of the game because we though that there was an (in our opinion significant) improvement over the original version AND a lot of work behind it (clonespy testifies it) AND there were no other 4k submissions for the Spectrum. I agree that it would have been better to discuss it either before or after the submission. I also believe that we wouldn't discuss about it so much now if the game didn't win last year. This was actually not expected so much.

Good. I won't comment the results and let the others to evaluate it.

It is difficult to impose rules like that. How can you say that a game is different enough to be considered a new game or a resumission? For instance, what would you say about say Bellringer II compared to Bellringer I ? I would say that they are different enough, but other people may think that they aren't. Overall, I think that resubmitting is not a bad idea. It gives the opportunity to improve your own game. It already happened several times over the years. I think that the compo is - first of all - a good opportunity to write good (mini) games. I personally never wrote a complete machine code program in the last century, but the minigame compo gave me motivations to do that now. I'd like the compo to maintain this spirit. For this same reason, I am againts having prizes for winners, and I know that I'm not the only one. About point deductions, the enhanced version of 4k race got -2 points less as an average than the original version. As you can see the "resubmission" has already been "punished", even if you probably think that this was not enough. Anyway, this is not the right forum to propose a rule for the minigame compo, which already has its forum. Feel free to propose it there, if you want.

4k race has 9 sprites of size that ranges from 144 to 196 bytes (the 196 byte ones are actually scaled-up versions of 48 byte sprites), for a total of about 1.5k. Approximatively, 32 different sizes for each sprite are shown, which already bring to 48k. A full version of the game would require much more sprites, of course I think that every game is really a different story. It is about balancing speed, size, and so on. In the case of 4krace, IMO it was better to do what I did. In others your trick may be the right choice.

Hi Thomas, I'm definitely surprised by the 69%. I don't see any explanation for that. Also, I downloaded your utility and it gives me '=' instead of 69, which AFAIK means almost the same as 34.

Howdy! I'm Paolo, the author of 4krace/4krace-rf. Sorry if I am arriving late to this discussion, but I knew about that only now. The refueled version of 4k race came out during the development of a full version of the game. Since there was no 4k Spectrum submission in 2005 I decided to "pack" the results obtained so far in 4k, and resubmit it. When I did it I knew that there would have been criticisms, and I have no problems accepting them. The only thing that worries me is if my submission becomes too much an issue. I agree that there are not many improvements in playability, and the ones that I made are not easily identifiable. The presentation is also too similar to the previous version, but there was no time to change it. However, I don't really agree that the game has only minor improvements. In racing games, a realistic prospective of the street is very important. The original version wasn't really good about that: it was like driving on a sort of cylindric world of just say 100 meters of diameter. The new version is much more realistic. If you compare the experience of playing the two games you can definitely notice the difference. Maybe this is not clear in this community, but, from a mere technical point of view, this was quite an achievement. This is not only my opinion, but the opinion of several people in the Spectrum community. It also required a lot of code rewriting. Not all routines were rewritten from scratch, of course, but they were optimized in size and/or speed. The only things that remained the same are minor and include the title screen, screen clearing, score, random number generator and other cars generation/moving (but not drawing, of course). Also a few sprites are the same, of course. Believe me that writing the new version required a lot of time. A final technical note. Many racing games have a different pre-drawn sprite for each distance of an object. It is clearly not possible to have it in a 4k game, and it is anyway impossible to have a sprite in memory for every distance even in a full 48k/128k game. Consequently those racing games have sprites only for fixed distances, and this is IMO very unrealistic. I think that calculating the sprites on-the-fly is much a better solution, if it doesn't bring to a slowdown. I hope that I have made things more clear. There won't be any more 4krace competing, not even in the 8k cat. I hope that Luciano and I will find time to make a full version of the game. Cheers, Paolo