Zoltar's Return - Hardware accelerated OpenGL inside a java applet !

By Lilian Chamontin

Zoltar is a game I've written in 2004. At this time the game won one of the prizes of the great Java Games Development Contest.
I've refreshed it a little bit in order to demonstrate the JOGLAppletLauncher technology.

Zoltar's Return

The JOGLAppletLauncher is a Java component I've created as a proof of concept in 2005, which has been included (and enchanced a lot !) into the official OpenGL Java binding (JOGL) from Sun Microsystems.

This technology allows rendering a game inside a web page at full hardware speed, assuming :

  • Your computer has a recent 3D graphics card (NVIDIA or ATI if possible)
  • You've installed the most recent OpenGL drivers for this card (available from the manufacturer's web site)
  • You've installed a recent java runtime (also known as Java Plug-In or JRE) with at least version 1.4. (This kind of JRE comes preinstalled on most computers nowadays, and is always shipped on mac computers)

Play Zoltar's Return

You can try the game here : Zoltar's Return (keep in mind it's a proof of concept, not a commercial game).

The game size is around 3 megs, which could (and will) be further optimized to go below 1 meg (thanks to pack200 compression in java 5).

Game rules

Your ship is easy to handle :

  • LEFT/RIGHT ARROW KEYS : direction
  • MOUSE : aim at enemies
  • LEFT MOUSE BUTTON : shoot (hold button pressed = continuous shoot)
  • RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON / UP ARROW : change weapon

Sounds : during the game, you can stop/restart music by pressing "F4" or "M" and Special effects with "F5" or "F".

The game doesn't work ?

If the game doesn't work, please check the requirements again, or send me an email at info@javapause.com.

If the game runs slowwww with Firefox, this is due to an incompatibility with the TalkBack plugin. You can disable this plug-in from the Tools/Plug-Ins menu : select TalkBack, and use the "disable" button.

Final word

Don't hesitate to contact me, I'm always happy to have to have some feedback (positive or not).