JRBall

This file will lead you through the configuration of JRBall, a 3D Racquetball based Java applet.  It was written by Branton Boehm (email) in August of 2000.  It has many specific customizations so that you can make it fit in with practically any site.  You can see this applet, along with many others, at http://www.realapplets.com/.

Sections:

1. Param Tags
2. Files
3. Sample Configuration
4. Scoring

Param Tags:

There are 12 param tags.  They are:

    numballs
    holesize
    ballcolor1
    ballcolor2
    ballcolor3
    bgcolor
    fontcolor
    holeimage
    wallimage
    ballimage
    titleimage
    titlecaption

"numballs" simply specifies how many balls each game should start with.  If this is left out, it is set to five.

"holesize" specifies how many pixels square the hole in the back wall should be.  If this is left out, it is set to 50.

"ballcolor1", "ballcolor2", and "ballcolor3" specify the colors of the ball if "ballimage" isn't specified.  These must be RGB values without a '#' before it.  For example, for blue you would have "0000FF".  "ballcolor1" and "ballcolor2" are the two main colors while "ballcolor3" is the warning color.

"bgcolor" specifies the color of the background and walls.

"fontcolor" specifies the color of the font and lines drawing the walls.

"holeimage" specifies an image to be displayed in the area of the hole.  it is scaled to fit the "holesize".

"wallimage" specifies the image to be displayed on the back wall of the court.  It is tiled to fit.

"ballimage" specifies an image that should be used instead of the "ballcolor"s.  if both are specified, "ballimage" will still be displayed instead of the colors.  please note: with "ballimage" there is no warning when the ball is about to be lost.

"titleimage" specifies the image to be displayed at the top of the cover page.  it should be 125x125 pixels but a slight variance is alright.  this tag is very important and the game will not work without it.

"titlecaption" specifies the caption to appear under "titleimage".

Files:

There are five required files for the actual game.  They are JRBall.class, Location.class, wall.au, swing.au, and miss.au.  Each need to be in the same directory (folder) as your HTML page.  In addition to this, you need to have your image files for the wall, ball, etc. in that same directory.

Sample Configuration:

Here is a sample configuration for JRBall:

<APPLET CODE="JRBall.class" WIDTH="450" HEIGHT="300">
    <PARAM NAME="numballs" VALUE="8">
    <PARAM NAME="holesize" VALUE="25">
    <PARAM NAME="ballcolor1" VALUE="0000FF">
    <PARAM NAME="ballcolor2" VALUE="FF0000">
    <PARAM NAME="ballcolor3" VALUE="FFFF00">
    <PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="000000">
    <PARAM NAME="fontcolor" VALUE="FFFFFF">
    <PARAM NAME="holeimage" VALUE="hole.jpg">
    <PARAM NAME="wallimage" VALUE="backwall.jpg">
    <PARAM NAME="titleimage" VALUE="title.gif">
    <PARAM NAME="titlecaption" VALUE="Come on in to play JRBall!">
</APPLET>

Scoring:

In JRBall, the lower your score the better.  Here is how the score is calculated:

As you can see, it's really important not to lose balls.  A perfect score is equal to the number of balls the game starts with (i.e., if "numballs" = 10, perfect score = 10).