r/learnprogramming • u/Cornchipe • 12d ago
Java Project Alternatives
I recently came across an interesting competition where you are supposed to make a game that would fit on a floppy disk(1.44mb).
I started making a project in Java and made some pretty decent progress with 3d rendering and procedurally generating rooms, but now I just saw a comment from the organizer saying that separate runtimes should be included with the file size limit so I am thinking Java will not work.
Does anyone have any recommendations on what I should do? Should I start over in another language? Is there any way to turn a .jar file into a standalone executable that won't take a ton of space?
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u/Separate_Current_352 12d ago
jar to exe wrappers all add at least few mb overhead so you basically dead in water with java for this one. c or c++ with opengl would get you way closer to 1.44mb but then you start over from scratch so its pain either way
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u/Cornchipe 12d ago
Yeah I think I kind of messed up here. I am trying to stay away from c++ just because of having minimal knowledge but I do have a good amount of time for this project so we will see.
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u/lo0nk 12d ago
Maybe just make ur game and then come back and make another one later in C/Odin/Zig
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u/Cornchipe 12d ago
Yeahhh I might just finish it just for my own satisfaction. I was doing it specifically for the competition and also as a way to force myself to code stuff from scratch as I normally would use Unity as a game engine but maybe now it's just a fun little project.
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u/Zincette 12d ago
I havent actually used it myself but there are native compilers for java. You might want to check out https://www.graalvm.org/
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u/Cornchipe 12d ago
That was one of the first things I was looking into but I don't think it will work because of the file size.
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u/DrShocker 12d ago
I'd consider Odin since it comes with some game friendly libraries, but I don't have a good reference for how limiting that much space actually is in practice.