Well, next weekend you have a great chance of learning the game

This from our official forum:
"We celebrate our first month of World Empires Live by giving all registered players full game trial on January 29th-31st. If you have not yet registered do so for free by following this link
http://www.worldempireslive.com/register.html

This also gives you an additional instant 1 day full game trial which is always given out to new players. Join this and any upcoming parties, register today!"

Yes
Commander Europe at War
Commander Napoleon at War

were programmed by me and all in Java. You get 1 day free trial when you register at our site and that is good news. Even better news is, we will have occasional campaigns a few times per year where all previously registered players get some bonus free days added to their accounts. Register today if you want to join the Party and play for free several times a year

The similarity to Civilization is because that is also a Grid/Board based Empire Building game. Today there are very few of those to choose between, especially if you are looking for a game suited for medium complexity medium pace multiplayer. Most other games are either fast RTS games with small complexity or slow complex Strategy games that are more suited for single player.

Ok, World Empires Live was released 5th January so all further info from now on is available at the official site: http://www.worldempireslive.com

Legendary, does that mean you wanna give this game a go

Looks like the game is ready to go any day now. I finished digging out about 50 SFX from libraries. The music done by James Stant is more than 10 short and long tunes!
Kurt Eichert is a great modder that I know from working on the Commander series and he is now a designer for World Empires Live.

All visual from the clips or screenshots are made by Sergey Churbanov. Christoph Aschwanden from Noblemaster.com does all the online technology. I could go on and on and talk about this project and how well all has been progressing, now I just hope players will enjoy this game 

World Empires Live release date set to Janaury 5th 2010, but you can DL and play the Demo while waiting. The full announcement here

http://www.multiplayerhub.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3290

We just went public beta so anyone can DL and play today!


EDIT: Removed some links that are outdated.

World Empires Live have now gone into official beta testing!
Beta forum: http://www.multiplayerhub.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=3271

It is still not too late to sign up for beta testing, sign up -> http://www.multiplayerhub.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3199

Beta testers will be greatly rewarded with 5 months free subscription.

A little uipdate here 
We now accept applicants for beta testing. In only a few weeks beta testing of World Empires Live will begin so if you want your free account to try this Java game before it is out here is your chance

http://www.multiplayerhub.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3199
 

Game presented by Firepower Entertainment and Noble Master Games.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=652zerALmT0

Technically I am using passive rending and Swing for the game which suits the style of gameplay and makes UI more object oriented for me.

Game is scheduled for Q1 2010


edit:
World Empires Live was released 5th January 2010.
Official site is http://www.worldempireslive.com

Thanks!
That worked. Maybe because java.awt.Image is AWT while I use SWING components (Swing JPanel as painting area)?

Do I need to use ImageIcon then for every frame, or is there a point in me recognisising if a image is "firstdraw==true" and use ImageIcon only then? Does the ImageIcon usage change performance or memory usage to any extent otherwise I just use this call for each frame


ImageIcon icon=new ImageIcon(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(s));
Image ret=icon.getImage();

the old code is here below  ->

//Image ret=Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(s);

which causde flicker first time an image was drawn.

I wonder if there are any limits to the mediatracker. I am loading hundreds of images for my game, some of them very small. There are some arts that did not get loaded since I see in game first time they are used there is a small flicker.

I tried checkAll and waitForAll and even did System.out.println on the path to see if it matched and it seems it matched exactly the path where i have the images.

I have also inced Xms and Xmx in case it was a memory shortage problem. Is there any kind of limits I do not know of such as the game deallocating that memory that was suppoed to contain all images in game or something else?

Thanks for all the replies, I did not expect this many replies seems it is interesting topic 

I am not using single-producer/single consumer since there are many threads that are adding into the vector but only one that is removing from vector. This belongs to the NETWORKING forum in fact so that is why I did not bring up the networking details yet. Why I have many producers is because host has one socket per player so one thread per player in fact. Client only have one socket since all its communication goes to server. Server broadcast to the other clients.

So in a 4 player game the HOST has 3 threads with one socket each picking up messages from that player, using streams (objectoutputstream, objectinputstream). I am not sure, some say I can just use one single socket for all communication and let all players send on it. Would it work like a queue so that no problem occur if 2 players send a message simultaneously I am not sure.

Why I chose vector was, at one time I was thinking the consumer should be able to search through the orderqueue for a specific instruction but so far I have not needed such functionality.


 

Hi
Been a while since I posted, been busy programning my new RTS game or in fact it is rather a TBS/RTS hybrid.

Anyway, since it uses a peer2peer system (will later convert it to a combination of client server and peer2peer with a web server) I am dealing with thread safety. As of now, I have not had any problems but I only tried it 3 players so far, if game will have 10-20 players problems might show up that I do not yet have realised. So, I am going to check with others here if my method is correct or if I already need to design something better. 

Now, here is how the HOST player works.

It has an orderqueue, basically a class basically like a vector but it decodes the strings you have put into the vector to something useful for the game i.e. an action that is to be performed. A "a 129 133" for example could be decoded as to attack from hex 129 to hex 133 or in code be using like game.resolvebattle(129, 133, blablabla some parameters needed here). So the orderqueue is used by game and the game uses it like a queue so it removes the first element and performs that action (for example might be someone that says "I move my Militia from 30, 30 to 30, 35).

Any requested order in game results to sending into the HOST orderqueue. So there is one queue per game session with say up to 16 players and it is positioned in the host player game. An order means for example move unit or attack or purchase a unit or deploy unit or declare war, ..., etc...

Now, the threads that are used for the socket connections (one socket per client by the way) gets incoming strings and put them into the orderqueue.

I heard that Vector is thread safe but that it is also not 100% thread safe, Meaning, if I do orderqueue.get(0) and say that there is only one object in it and someone else does orderqueue.remove(0) at the same time if I am unlucky the remove is done first and the get results in exception.

BUT, the fine thing is all the incoming traffic result in the add method and only the one thread on the host game will remove anything from queue. This means, there are several thread adding into the queue but only ONE thread running that will ever remove anything from the queue, so is this combination thread safe?

Hi Guys!
Long time since I posted. My 2nd game is now finished, Commander Napoleon at War made purely in Java and Swing. I just have to post this review since the quote here is what we all already knew (about Java) but want to hear isn't it?

http://pc.ign.com/articles/926/926869p2.html

"Commander: Napoleon at War runs in Java, which has given us no real problems so far. Though there aren't too many graphical options here, it looks quite good by most wargame standards."

Hi Guys, long time since. What has happened this year is we finally decided to release a PC Demo for the game so now you can try it out for free and see how it turned out 

http://www.slitherine.com/downloads/ceaw/demos.html

If you have any questions or opinions good or bad just let me know I appreciate others point of views especially from a community that understands the Java way of doing things 

If so, what formats are supported? Is it possible to play .avi for example or at leist make a try for it and if the desired codecs does not exist it just catch that exception and carries on with the loading of the game.

Planning to use introduction movies for my future games so I need to launch the movie within the application 
Anyone tried JFM or directshow wrapper or anyhing else already built for this purpose?

Hi folks!
Been a long time since I posted on the forum. Wanted to say that Commander Europe at War was released in June 2007 for PC and was written entirely in Java with me being the sole programmer. Game was also released on the Mac platform recently and a Mac demo is available at Apple's homepage indeed, no demo for PC. I started using Java because it was so well structured and meant for me a significant productivity increase especially when considering bug fixing and technical know how issues. I can now do what I love the most which is games, programming games and in Java.

Firepower Entertainment is my own company and it was born early in the process of the development of CEAW. I now work full time on the Commander series so can actually make a living out of it. So it is possible even for small niches as traditional wargames to succeed using Java and not only for MMORPG's.

Check it out! 

CEAW : http://www.slitherine.com/games/ceaw
CEAW developers forum : http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=18&sid=11ee2f5be8d1f5fde63732b19e511ed1
Mac demo : http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/demos_updates/commandereuropeatwar.html