portals, casual game, java?

[jankoM]

Hi,

I intend to upgrow one of flash games I made of more casual type into a downloadable and sellable product. I had intention to make all more demanding games that aren't fit for flash in java and Slick (lwjgl) before but now I am not sure if this is smart decision or nor distribution wise. Because it's a casual type it I can assume I will also try to sell it through the portals..

As princec figured out I could pack a game with molebox with JRE inside only gaining couple of megs and by that remove the need for users to have java installed. I looked but I haven't seen any java games I know for on the portals, I know for some python made (Snaky Jake for example) so I can assume that this sort of packing is not that problematic..

But today I realised another problem is openGL on windows, as far as I have seen java has no directX binding (one is in work at lwjgl people), so now I am not so sure any more...

can anyone with experience tell me how big problem opengl and potentially java are in the portal space?

best regards,
Janko

[Indiepath]

I remember this from a while back: http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=810

[jankoM]

Hmm.. that is the good news first and the bad news later ;)

At first I thought the point is "If even James C. Smith uses openGl then Janko M. can without a problem" ... then after coming back just before commenting I saw the date was 2004 and the last post where he said that they found openGl to be too problematic.

[jankoM]

I still haven't decided (beacause I don't have to just yet) ... The bussines man in me says I should use Blitzmax... the language enthusiasts and lover of all cool underrated things in me says I should use JVM (Scala) or Lua.

Funny that I never saw it mentioned on javagaming but I figured out (a thing I knew or have seen all the time) that Java has a passage to DX8 DX9 (and 2 software renderers) through Irrlicht. I tested jirr and in worked really nice.

Otherwise LWJGL is having a dx binding written I think (cas probably knows exactly) and something is happening at java2d's directX pipeline so future seems interesting.

I will boil on it some more..

...can I "shoot" one direct question at James C. Smith? I was looking at Game Center and I liked how you provide a clear and concrete path of submitting games to your game center. I will probably try to go that route once game is done. Would you accept a game made in java with embeded jre (so user doesn't have to have it installed) and opengl if everything else would be on the level of acceptance?

[James C. Smith]

I am not in charge of accepting games. I make games. It is a deferent division at Reflexive that accepts games and sells them in GameCenterSolution/Reflexive.com. But my understanding is that there are very few hard and fast rules about what they accept. If a game is “good”, and runs reasonable well on the test systems, they will add it to the catalog. They never exclude a game because of one particular rule about download size, controls, or system requirements. But all of those things to factors into the decision. Also, it is not just a matter of if you game is good enough or not. It is more may be more about if it is better than the other 30 games being considered.

Also, you goal should not be to meet the minimum requirements of the portals. Your goal should be to target a large audience. Even if you find a portal that accepts you game using OpenGL, your game may reach many more customers if it support DirectX. My understanding is that the OpenGL situation is even worse today because of Vista. Many band new Vista systems with fancy ATI graphics card do not ship with OpenGL enabled drivers. Those drivers may be available for download, but many user will not have them and will not be willing to install them. Remember, they download a FREE trial version of your game. They have nothing invested in it. There got it from a web site that has 800 games. If you game doesn’t work right away when they download it, they will just move on and try another one rather than reconfiguring their system to make this one work.

[jankoM]

Thanks for your reply.. first and second part.

You told many things between the lines that I knew back there but didn't really see them in such a factual way.. I will see, basically I have to decide what is my goal and then the answer is rather obvious.

[arcadetown]

Just make your game work. Trust me Java = bad and opengl = bad, combine those and you've got mojo bad karma. Just too many oddball things that can go wrong on various user comps.

[elias4444]

Trust me Java = bad and opengl = bad, combine those and you've got mojo bad karma. Just too many oddball things that can go wrong on various user comps

Unless they're using a Mac... or Linux.... or Windows XP... :D
I think the only issues I'm aware of right now for openGL are Windows Vista, and a few oddball graphic drivers on Win XP. Cas, you notice anything other than those? (I figure, he'd know)

As far as Java is concerned, I haven't had any issues with it for the last few years. And if you plan on coding for anything mobile right now, Java is a pretty nice way to go. ;)

[James C. Smith]

Does Java work well with the EXE wrappers (DRM) that most portals use?

[GolfHacker]

Just make your game work. Trust me Java = bad and opengl = bad, combine those and you've got mojo bad karma. Just too many oddball things that can go wrong on various user comps.

Having released and sold Dirk Dashing (an OpenGL game) on Windows, Mac, and Linux over the past year, I think I can address the OpenGL question with some expertise:

Elias4444 is right - OpenGL is a non-issue on the Mac. Every Mac computer sold in recent years has working OpenGL drivers out-of-the-box.

With Linux, it depends on your graphics card. NVidia and ATI are well-supported, but not necessarily other cards. By the way, the new ATI driver for Linux rocks (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=897&num=1)! Two other things to consider about Linux, which I learned with Dirk Dashing: first, there are a lot of Linux users who refuse to use the proprietary binary drivers from NVidia and ATI out of principle, and therefore won't be able to play your OpenGL game. Second, a lot of Linux users started with Linux by taking an old computer (especially older laptops) and trying Linux on it, which means they are running with hardware that doesn't have decent OpenGL support, even with the latest drivers. So my Linux customer base isn't as large as it could be if I had programmed with straight SDL or something (but of course, then Dirk Dashing wouldn't have had alpha-blending and anti-aliasing for smooth sprite edges, particle effects, or hardware acceleration, and probably wouldn't have been able to support 16-layer parallax scrolling).

On Windows Vista, OpenGL itself works just fine. The problem right now is that the ATI drivers are still in beta, and other video card vendors have been slow to provide decent OpenGL support for their Vista drivers. NVidia seems to be the only one that has its act together for Vista, from what I've seen and read.

On Windows XP, most of the latest drivers for all of the cards are in great shape, except for the occasional oddball, as Elias4444 said. However, there are lots of XP users who have never updated their video drivers and are running with drivers that are 3-4 years old in some cases. Almost all of the support issues I troubleshoot for XP players fall into this category. In nearly every case, the issues go away if they update their drivers. But some users won't update their drivers, because they're afraid of something going wrong and messing up their machines.

With older versions of Windows, usually running on older machines, OpenGL support is hit-or-miss. However, I haven't had too many customers asking about older Windows versions, which leads me to believer there aren't that many people still using Win 98/98SE/ME/2000, or if there are, they just avoid games that list OpenGL as a requirement.

[jankoM]

Does Java work well with the EXE wrappers (DRM) that most portals use?

I was hoping to get to ask this too..

@arcadetown: yes althogh I like java as a language my scientific formula was similar to your mojo karma formula.

GolfHacker... thanks for your technical explanation I read it carefully.

elias... yes cas is the stats man of all java and opengl. His games are more hardcore so more techie guys might play them and if I would do a hardcorish game I would use Slick (LWJGL) without much doubt. I am restrained here especialy because it goes for a casual game.

---

Where did things go.. I have two options which I will see with which one I will go for this particular game.

a) I returned back to PTK and vc6 but I studied Lua (Python..) and decided to either embed it into a sort of engine made with PTK or bind PTK to lua. Then I discovered that Neko VM (http://nekovm.org/) which I use for some other things is very similar to lua and maybe even more suitable so I am working on that plan with neko.

(for those of you who think Lua is some toy/embedable/scripting language ... I wholy disagree... To me Lua is one of the most interesting dynamic languages right now.)

(I also looked about binding PTK to java but it seemed more complicated and I am not too strong on c compilers level)

b) I found PulpCore (http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/) a very nice and capable software renderer + more in Java which I hope I will be able to use to make online/desktop games for some specific use cases

... otherwise I also know from before a very capable 2D scenegraph library Piccolo for java but somehow I don't know if it is also appropriate for games .. (I imagine it for some sort of strategy games) I made a 2d cad application in it.. I just posted video and wrote what I used there (http://itmmetelko.com/blog/?p=60) in case anyone gets some usable info from it.