John Harrison's Journal: How hard can Pacman with one ghost be?

After a long pause I have updated my Java Applet Pacman game. There are several improvements, the most notable of which is that the Ghost is much smarter. Also the graphics shouldn't flicker on slow systems. Now I ask you, dear reader, to give it a whirl and tell me what you think. Are there bugs? Odd behavior? Have a suggestion? Please let me know!

Newest version of the game is here.

Finally, I am thinking of moving all my pages off of Angelfire. Does anyone have any free homepage suggestions?

who are those people?

[subgeek]

on my athlon 2000+ system, it started to lag pretty consistently around level 4. it also seems that the game moves a little quickly as the board shrinks. a little speed increase is ok, but those turns start getting about 4mm apart from each other and that makes the game get difficult a little too fast, imo.

pretty cool though. the map generation is pretty cool. it makes some pretty interesting options.

Re:who are those people?

[John Harrison]

I'll have to test it out on slower systems. I have been running it on my T40, which has a 1.6 ghz Pentium M.

Ok, just tested on the 300 MHz Celeron, and it runs smooth. How much memory do you have? Does it lag when the ghost hits an intersection?

If the turns are too close you could change the resolution of your monitor.... :)

The speed right now is tuned to my playing experience. I can often get through all the boards without losing a life. Obviously I have played it more than anyone else, so I mi

Re:who are those people?

[subgeek]

my system shouldn't be too much slower than yours. i've got a full gig of RAM, so i'm pretty sure that's not the problem. it occurs to me that i was playing it on opera while downloading and also loading fark photoshop contests in another tab. that may have had something to do with it. i'll have to try it again tonight without any other browser activity and see how it goes. (can't play it at work.)

i still wonder who the people on the first maze are.

Re:who are those people?

[subgeek]

it turns out that it's something in the way opera 7.5 runs java. it doesn't lag at all in explorer, but lags in opera when the ghost crosses an intersection. hopefully that helps you out some.

Re:who are those people?

[John Harrison]

I think I have it figured out. I ran it on my old 300 MHz Celeron and found that if the Java Console was enabled it was much slower, but ran fine without it. There is a Java control panel which allows you to modify it. In any case, I can distribute the operations that are performed at the intersection over several moves, which will fix the problem.

Re:who are those people?

[subgeek]

can i use you as a reference when i put "game tester" on my resume?

(i'm not really serious, but i do want a job where that sort of thing would be good on a resume.)

Re:who are those people?

[John Harrison]

sure thing.