2007 PGD "Multiplexity" Game Programming Compo

[IlovePascal]

If you meet the goal requirements you get the 20. If you don't meet them all then you get a big fat Zero.

Stage Goals are worth all or nothing of the point values listed. This will be the same until the final stage where you will then be judged and scored from 0 to 200 for each 'Judged Category'.

Then what's the point of there being 3 judges? :? Is it possible that you have done something and at the same time haven't :shock:
For example, if the goal is "Create a Main Menu", either you created it or you didn't, right? So either you get 3X points or 0, correct? So why 3 judges?

[grudzio]

Then what's the point of there being 3 judges? :? Is it possible that you have done something and at the same time haven't :shock:
For example, if the goal is "Create a Main Menu", either you created it or you didn't, right? So either you get 3X points or 0, correct? So why 3 judges?

Remember that the points gained for completing stages are only a part of total score. (1/6 if I remember correctly).

[IlovePascal]

Oh! so the fact that there are 3 judges will only be useful at the end... [size=9px](no hard feelings ! :lol: )[/size]

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Where is the revised document? I login in the contest page and there´s only the original document, without comments... maybe I didn´t get the points :lol:

The comments and scores.... you'll have to wait for those until Clootie has finished scoring. Then all the results will be published together. With regards to why there are 3 judges... a more balanced view. At this stage, we should all be able to read your documents, but with stage 2 when you have to start submitting programs... one of the requirements is that you design your game to run on the judges hardware... so it could be that it runs on Sascha and Clooties machines but not mine... they can score you... I can't.

My Comments and Scores For Stage 1

Unlike Sascha, I'm not commenting on genre choices at this stage. This is largely because I felt that practically all entries have clear ideas that fit neatly into their chosen genre, but also because at this point, you're only telling me what you going to try and achieve. One or two entries got me thinking, but ultimately I have to take the documents at face value. So now its up to you to prove to me that you have incorporated the genres you said you would. In the case of the one or two entries that got me thinking, it was a case of 'can they/have they incorporated enough of the second genre' for it to qualify.

As Sascha pointed out, theres not really a lot to say at this stage because we are only judging some very basic requirements. The real comments will start with stage 2. So if you are one of the many teams that got 'Great Job'... apologies... theres just too many good looking entries this year ;-)

Overall, I think everyone has done a great job so far and I'm really looking forward to playing all the games. Some remind me of old classics, some remind me of plans we have for our own products (which is admittedly a bit worrying), but one thing they all have in common.... they make me want to play :-D Great job guys.

If you have any questions about my judging, comments, then please post them in this thread.

[Eric]

I did not see an entry size limit in the rules... is there a size limit on the entries? I'm currently having to decide between generating stuff at runtime, ie. small size but more coding work & optimization, vs pre-generating, which means less work, but larger files...

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Last year the file size limit was 20MB, but some teams broke that, although they were the minority.

The biggest issue I think is server bandwidth. If each team submits 20MB thats 60MB when we download it to judge it. Soon adds up.

Hopefully WILL or Savage can chime in to make it clear if there is a limit and if so, how big.

[WILL]

I cannot say officially what the max. size is this year... though I can tell you with the uttermost certainty, it will depend on the PHP timeout setting no matter what we set it to.

Whenever you upload your entry the page that does all the work is a single script that just packs your file into a package and starts sending it up to the site. If that script is still running when the timeout passes, it will stop the page and give you the error message of "page script timeout... blahblahblah" So... though we may want to give you 30MB, it might turn out that the page times out after 25MB of upoading... this is of course something else we have to consider.

So when uploading it really helps if you have a fast (or just not slow) connection. Just think faster connection = bigger file sending capability.

As for the set limit, if the new teams competing this year don't know it's mostly to prevent super consumption of our monthly bandwidth. We'd love to be able to provide 200MB games made in Pascal, but truth is... we just don't have the kind of capital to support that. :?

Last year I believe we choose 20MB as Athena said, but we eventually moved it up to 30 Mb in some cases.

I would think that we are keeping to 30 MB but if you have a real need (for the quality of your game's sake) to go higher to contact and ask him about it. Of course he may give us a totally different answer after this.

[JSoftware]

Now if your problems are about saving bandwidth and timeout times couldn't you then just have people requiring larger file sizes use their own mirroring service?

[WILL]

In short, not really no.

The long...

In the first competition we didn't have a competition system in place we just had competitors upload their games to an FTP. That proved to have a whole set of issues all onto it's self.

The fact is the we need the scripts to be able to control the tracking of meeting deadlines and the like so uploading to an external filespace doesn't really allow us to show these scripts who met the deadline and who didn't. It takes any chance of a question if one team was allowed more time than the other and several other 'fairness' concerns.

Also on top of that there is a maintenance aspect to consider. We can maintain all the files within our site. We cannot maintain file that are not within our site. If anyone remembers the older 2005 details pages you will agree that external linking can cause a huge mess and sometime a maintenance nightmare.

Plus also by retaining copies of your entries we can ensure that we have them around when we want to make ads such as those that I've released in the last couple of weeks using captured video footage from them.


So we keep it all in-house so we do not lose any of the content that would otherwise be lost by someone else and so we can tell for sure if that team has met a deadline or not. We also can present them all on our site advertise with them and have them on one spot available without a major amount of work involved.

[Eric]

I would think that we are keeping to 30 MB but if you have a real need (for the quality of your game's sake) to go higher to contact and ask him about it. Of course he may give us a totally different answer after this.

Ok understood! I'm now on one of those new 22" monitors, and so I have a tendency to use very high resolution textures, ie. 4k x 4k... I'll stick with low-res textures for all the intermediate stages and preserve bandwidth