As IBM Websphere Application Developer is an extended version of Eclipse. The drawback on WSAD is: It is not pure Java, there are some DLL files bundled. So far I had no luck to get it running on Mac OS X

What might be better for your health, the burger or the game?  

Very nice reviews!

Cas, do sales go up after the reviews were posted. I mean by a significant level.

Just saw that Alien Flux is mentioned on insidemacgames http://insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=7898  

Huu, dont trust the guys from Redmond!!  

But their Java version will soon disappear, right? Hmm, have you tried the IBM JRE, it sometimes "feels" faster to me, but I haven't done any timestamps yet.

From my last large project I just noticed one difference: methods with final attribute do speedup in 1.1.8. Maybe it was the special implementation (Lotus Notes server and servlet enfgine with 1.1.8 )...

With 1.3 I couldn't see a real difference

Any news regarding the OS X support? Haven't found anythign so far  

Strange, it doesn't start with the latest Safari beta, bu with Mozilla it's loading...

Cool! It even runs fast enough on my company's notebook with an 8MB absolutely outdated GFX card.

Nice work!!

Sorry, but I don't see your problem. Why is it not a game???

OK, it's not glorious at the moment, but it is under development and we'll see how it is improving.

Maybe it is too early to present it in public? NO! Read The Cathedral & The Basar if you done believe. http://www.fs.ei.tum.de/admin/howto/linuxeinf2/cathedral/cathedral-paper.html

It seems that you are doing a roguelike game. What I am missing is somewhat like a structure in the cave? Is it endless? I never came across walls or anything.

What about quests? Or items to equip, towns to visit, or even a princess with big ... to free

Maybe http://www.roguelikedevelopment.org/ can give you some inspiration. There are good articles on dungeon design, monster AI, characters, etc.. There are also some newsgroups that might be interesting like rec.games.roguelike.development or rec.games.roguelike.nethack.

Here http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/java-class-file-optimizers.html is an overview about class optimzing / obfuscating tools. Personally I tried jopt. I could not really determine any performance improvements. The classes were crunched a bit, in average I would say about 20%.

The ofuscating effect was fine so far to make class file debugging harder but by far not impossible.

Well, if you outsource graphics and sound and if the idea is nice, a one good one man game should be possible.

Have a look at http://www.snood.com for example: It looks quite simple and could have been a one man job, graphics are not great, but as far as I know tons of people are playing snood like hell!

Maybe it's not that title that hit the cover page of all game magazines, but you can make some money with it.

Slashdot had nearly the same story, look here:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/18/1452229&mode=thread&tid=127

The thing with swing is: Swing apps doesn't look like native apps regardless on the platform. People don't like this!

I have written a Lotus Sametime client for my company, it's 100% Java with Swing UI. It has nice improvement compared with the original Sametime client form Lotus and it even runs fine on Mac and Linux. But: Lots of Mac users asked about the client, but the dont like it, cause it does not look like a MacOS9/MacOSX application. Same I heared from Windows and Linux users. "Nice features, but the UI sux"  

I tried SWT as experiment. SWT seems to be somewhat faster as Swing and I am getting good feedback so far.

I am currently in a project that has to use JDK 1.1.8.

Compiler doesn't seem to make a difference, but JDK matters: We tried SUN 1.1.8 and IBM 1.1.8. IBM's JDK seems to be faster in casting operations and overloading.

In UI things ther was nearly no difference.

As obfuscator, we tried jode which removes all debug code, encodes field names, etc. There was a slightly performance boost, but we just noriced it in a loop with more as 100.000 runs and numerous casting operations. Even then the boost was below 2%  :-/

And -O parameter: Haven't noticed any performance difference.

I found  a Java3D game for Sharp Zaurus here: http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=654

Anyone got a device to test it?

Thanks for the link, the game is great, one of the best Java games I have seen so far