Home Programs Links Email Me View Guestbook Sign Guestbook

Josh Rosenbaum Programs

This page contains a few programs I made as a hobby.

Message Notifier for Trillian:

Update 2022/06/04: I haven't used this in years, so I'm not sure it still works.
What is it, you ask? Message Notifier uses your keyboard lights (and/or internal computer speaker) to notify you when you receive an IM message in Trillian. It has lots of options. See the Message Notifier page for details.

Jeopardy HTML/JavaScript Quiz Creator Start

Very Basic Java Shooter Game

Josh Rosenbaum Java Game Test Screenshot

I decided to enhance my Java skills, so I created a basic game with JDK 7. There are game engines out there that would be able to do the same in a smaller amount of time, but this wasn't about building a game, it was about working with Java. So in a way, this should be called a lesson or an "experiment" more than a game. The only 3rd party library used is a SPI (Service Provider Interface) for MP3 decoding. The SPI basically drops right into the standard Java Sound system, so with only a handful of lines of code I was able to use the same code I had previously been using with WAV sound files. (Of course with the benefit of a smaller package/JAR size.)

Features:

MIDI Jukebox for background music - Used MIDI to keep package size small. Would've been trivial to do MP3s.
Hitboxes (hit polygons, technically)/Bounding boxes - Collision detection.
Rotation - All elements have the ability to rotate, but currently only asteroids do it.
Resizable - Game automatically scales difficulty and onscreen objects.
Game FPS (this is not display FPS) automatically scales - If the game detects it is running slowly, frame time is increased and the game automatically scales movements. This will reduce smoothness if a person's game is running VERY slowly, but this is better than the game running in slow motion. For the most part at low level scaling, the user will not notice and will have a better experience.
Modular - Should be easy to add new weapons, explosions, asteroids, and ships. I did not do it, as I felt it wasn't going to enhance my Java anymore. I may in the future, though, because it has been fun building this. Should be easy to add a powerup feature for example.
Animated Sprite capabilities - Currently only explosions are animated, but adding to other objects is easy as this functionality works from a parent class.
Preloading - Images/Sounds are all preloaded at the start so there is no delay in gameplay.
Many other things that I'm not thinking of, but are probably mostly of interest to me.

Press F1 in the game to see a list of other keys you can press.

If you just want to play: Download Runnable JAR file. You will need the Java JRE installed to run this. If you have errors, make sure you are running the latest edition. (I used 7.)

For Developers: Download Source files in zip format. You will need the Java JDK installed to run this. If you have errors, make sure you are running the latest edition. (I used 7.) Finally you will need the MP3 SPI. I used 1.9.5. In the MP3 SPI file you will find 3 libraries you will need to link in: mp3spi1.9.5.jar, jl1.0.1.jar, and tritonus_share.jar. (Names may have changed slightly.) I used Eclipse to create/edit this.