Stormrunner

About Stormrunner

Stormrunner was developed by Templar Studios and released in the year 2000 to promote Lego Mindstorms' range of RCX robots. The game was revolutionary, at the time one of the largest Java games ever written, accessible as an applet, with a dramatic introduction and in-game datalogs provided by Macromedia's Flash.

links

• Templar's archived press release
• Introduction flash video

About this project

This project uses a ShadowJar feature to combine original Stormrunner JAR files with compiled modifications.

The objective is to maintain a version of the game which is as functional as it can be on modern computers.

How to use this project (without compiling)

Please ensure that you have a compatible JRE installed (see the section below for information on that). Get the JAR file from the latest release, and put it somewhere convenient. Stormrunner doesn't place any files in the same directory, so the location isn't too important.

Linux

Open a terminal, get yourself to the same directory as the stormrunner jar, and run java -jar stormrunner_filename.jar, substituting the filename. If you've got multiple versions of the jvm installed and java won't be a compatible one, on Linux at least you should look in /usr/lib/jvm and select an appropriate version, and use it something like this: /usr/lib/jvm/adoptopenjdk-8-hotspot-jre-amd64/bin/java stormrunner_filename.jar

Windows

Generally, you should be able to run the game by just ensuring you have Java installed, then doubleclicking on the jarfile. You may encounter some difficulty if there's different versions, and you'll have to select the appropriate one using command prompt if so.

How to compile this project

Please checkout the latest tagged release.

If you don't trust the JAR files I've provided (and you shouldn't), you can obtain an archive of Stormrunner at the link in this section. Place Stormrunner/TemplarStudios-Stormrunner-Media.jar and TemplarStudios-Stormrunner.jar into shadow/

Whether or not you trust me, if you have Gradle installed, the single next step is running gradle shadowJar. You should then have a runnable game jar in build/libs/!

A word on the Java runtime

It's highly recommended that you use a version 8 Java runtime environment. If you don't have one installed, AdoptOpenJDK packages are easy to use, and are available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, and AIX.

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu in particular, the packaged versions of OpenJDK have exciting sound bugs which cause deadlock. I've mitigated this by disabling sound entirely in that case, but if this applies and you want sound, use Oracle or AdoptOpenJDK JREs instead.

Version 9 of the JRE is the last version likely to work at all with this. Java has made significant changes to backwards compatibility since then, affecting both sound and graphics, and there's only so much that can be done without a total rewrite which may not be practical.

links

• http://biomediaproject.com/bmp/files/LEGO/gms/download/Mindstorms/Stormrunner.zip

Acknowledgements

This project relies heavily on Lee Benfield's CFR, and wouldn't be possible without bugfixes made in response to issues encountered decompiling these old classfiles.

Disclaimer

This project is not affiliated with the Lego company or with Templar Studios.