Hello, I am posting because I'm wondering if I can get any information about an old online game on the Nicktoons website called Capture the Newbies. It was a kid-friendly shooter that involved capturing tiny blue aliens called Newbies, I guess. I liked playing it a LOT when I was younger, but now, I've had no luck being able to play it.
Unlike most online games, this game was a Java game, according to a .jar file I found in the page source in Wayback Machine. And yes, I believe I was able to find this game, as I just said that I found the .jar file the game used. But the problem is, I cannot play it. This game probably used the Java plug-in for Internet Explorer, but when I try to open the .jar file in Internet Explorer with the Java plug-in, I have no luck.
I know very little about Java, so I'm asking for help on this whole thing. I can provide you with some (possibly) helpful links:
Buddy,I think you made a mistake,the link to the JAR file is just a link to this thread.
Oh, thank you. I'll change that!
Alright,I know a bit of Java,and I took a look at the JAR file. The first thing that I determined is that it is not an executable JAR file. I determined this by looking at the MANIFEST.MF file in the META-INF folder. There is no main attribute in the MANIFEST.MF file,which is the line that tells Java which class contains the main method. This means that you can't run the JAR file normally through Java,instead you have to tell Java which class contains the main method first so that it knows where to start. So,then I had to try and find out which class contained the main method,which was a pain in the ass. Whoever programmed this didn't bother to name the classes intuitively,they just literally named them by the letters of the alphabet. -_- *facepalm* This is a very bad practice,you're supposed to name them according to what they do so that people looking at it can tell what each one does without having to open them up and pour through the code. Like,for example if you've got one that handles some part of the graphics you'd name it graphics.class and ect.,and of course the one which contains the main method should be named main.class.
So then,because they didn't name it properly,I had to decompile the .class files into .java files in order to read the code and try to find the main method. I used javadecompilers.com to do this. I looked through all the files and could not find a main method. The main method always starts with the line "public static void main(String [ ] args)",and I looked for it by plugging this into the search function for every single file,and it wasn't found. A Java program cannot run without a main method,it's impossible,so I'd say this JAR file is a dead end. Why the main method is missing,I really can't tell you,it's quite strange. The only thing I can think of is that maybe Wayback Machine somehow didn't save the JAR file properly,the file is corrupted and the class which contains the main method is gone.
So yeah,my diagnosis is that it is impossible to run this JAR file,unfortunately. If anybody thinks that I did something wrong or missed something,please let me know.
UPDATE: OK,I've figured out what's going on with this JAR file. It's a Java applet,not a Java application. Apparently Java applets don't use public static void main() for the main method,they use public void init() instead. Now knowing this,I found that the main method is in CoreApplet.class. The only class that's kinda appropriately named lol. So now I could actually run the applet. To run the applet,you make an HTML file in the directory like this :
Then run that file with appletviewer. I ran it and the applet actually opened,but much to my disappointment it just displayed a message that said "Ooops! There was a problem downloading the game." It seems that your assumption that the entire game was contained within the JAR file was wrong . Looks like the JAR file is just one part,and it downloads the rest of the game from somewhere else,from some server that's long dead. Looks like this game will probably stay lost
The only thing I can give you is that when the applet runs,there's a line in the terminal that says it was made by Interactive Pulp LLC. I guess the next step here would be to research or contact Interactive Pulp,they might have whatever parts are missing.
UPDATE: OK,I've figured out what's going on with this JAR file. It's a Java applet,not a Java application. Apparently Java applets don't use public static void main() for the main method,they use public void init() instead. Now knowing this,I found that the main method is in CoreApplet.class. The only class that's kinda appropriately named lol. So now I could actually run the applet. To run the applet,you make an HTML file in the directory like this :
Then run that file with appletviewer. I ran it and the applet actually opened,but much to my disappointment it just displayed a message that said "Ooops! There was a problem downloading the game." It seems that your assumption that the entire game was contained within the JAR file was wrong . Looks like the JAR file is just one part,and it downloads the rest of the game from somewhere else,from some server that's long dead. Looks like this game will probably stay lost
The only thing I can give you is that when the applet runs,there's a line in the terminal that says it was made by Interactive Pulp LLC. I guess the next step here would be to research or contact Interactive Pulp,they might have whatever parts are missing.
Thank you so much!
I'll start thinking about e-mailing Interactive Pulp. They have a small website that's still up, with links to the e-mail of probably the creator, David Brackeen. Interestingly, on David Brackeen's website, there is a downloadable Java Applet game called Scared, which looks suspiciously similar to Capture the Newbies. Perhaps it was just a reskin of Scared?
I took a closer look at the code to try and get an idea of what it's doing in regards to downloading files. What it seems to be downloading is some graphical elements,fonts and .AU sound files. That's what's missing. It downloads these in a file called CaptureTheNewbies0.zip to the browser's temp folder. So yeah,that's what we're looking for now,a ZIP file.
I took a closer look at the code to try and get an idea of what it's doing in regards to downloading files. What it seems to be downloading is some graphical elements,fonts and .AU sound files. That's what's missing. It downloads these in a file called CaptureTheNewbies0.zip to the browser's temp folder. So yeah,that's what we're looking for now,a ZIP file.
I took a closer look at the code to try and get an idea of what it's doing in regards to downloading files. What it seems to be downloading is some graphical elements,fonts and .AU sound files. That's what's missing. It downloads these in a file called CaptureTheNewbies0.zip to the browser's temp folder. So yeah,that's what we're looking for now,a ZIP file.
I just put the ZIP file in the same directory and ran the applet again,and I was able to play the game! So,there you go buddy,mission accomplished
After some tinkering, it worked! I can't thank you enough!
Who knows? Maybe we're the first ones to play this game in years!
You're welcome ! I'm glad that I found it,it's a pretty good game . Like a kid-friendly DOOM haha. On a side note,you were right about it being a reskin of Scared,since when you run the applet there's a line in the terminal that says "Scared3D Engine 1.2",so yeah,it uses the same engine. That's interesting,since Scared came out in 1998,making the origins of this game much older than we thought.
I attempted to run the applet on my own, but when I downloaded the files it said that Access was denied. Any thoughts? I'm not experienced at all with running java applets so any advice at all would be helpful.
I attempted to run the applet on my own, but when I downloaded the files it said that Access was denied. Any thoughts? I'm not experienced at all with running java applets so any advice at all would be helpful.
It seems that for some reason, the Applet Viewer or something won't work anymore (Java update, perhaps?). Everyone seems to be getting an error that jli.dll doesn't exist. I downloaded it, but then it gave an error that it was unable to start. I have no good idea why this is happening.
Well, at least we have all of the game's files, now...