IMO there are five more or less ready-to-use choices, when you want to make a 3D cross-platform game, that works in the browser on desktop systems, and has a shared codebase for all systems.
here is my personal ranking:

	Importance	Java/Java Applet/WS	GWT WebGL/HTML5 with Java/Java Applet/WS fallback	(GWT) HTML5/WebGL	Unity	Flash
Ease of 2D content creation	1	3	3	2	3	1
Ease of 3D content creation	1	2	3	3	1	2
Ease of GUI creation	1	3	4	2	4	1
iOS Support	2	3	3	-	1	2
Android Support	2	1	1	3	2	2
In-Browser availability	2	2	1	2	3	1
Performance	2	1	2.5	3	1	2
Pricing	3	1	1	1	3	2
Technology lifetime	3	1	2 (Google support?)	1	2 (one vendor)	3
Java server compatibility	4	1	3 (WebSocket)	3 (WebSocket)	2	2
Commercial support	5	3	3	3	1	2

@andyMak: iOS is like IE to me, too many (paying ?) users to ignore. I don't think Flash is that resource hungry, but for sure there is a performance disadvantage. To determine the resource hungriness we can make a start by testing the apps on this list http://www.appbrain.com/apps/popular/adobe-air/

Yeah libGDX is really cool I recommend it to everyone who wants to create an Android/Desktop game. It has a really cool featureset!

@gouessej Well Adobe Air compiles to Objective-C, I don't think Apple will do something against this. It's this way for some time now and I don't think they will change their policy in a weird way again since Steve Jobs is no more. I once developed an app with Objective-C for university and I hate XCode, when my game (which may never be finished since this is how most of these kind of projects work) doesn't work with Air on iOS I will have to port it manually...

as i said: many java browser games loose customers because of java (yea i will probably have to search for quotes ). cross-plattform means iOS too. Adobe Air allows me to deploy on all big mobile platforms and desktop browsers. I didn't test stage3d on mobile yet, but posts like this http://blogs.aerys.in/jeanmarc-leroux/2012/06/18/new-minko-2-features-normal-mapping-and-parallax-mapping/ are promising. for the desktop you need in-browser support for a real casual experience, especially when you want to integrate into social platforms. the need for in-browser gameplay is not present in mobile games, because you have a small screen and you are used to switch between apps. in-browser flash for mobile devices was/is useful to look at videos, the rest can be a standalone app w/o loosing anything, but gaining the possibility to extra charge for an app.

btw going with flash on the client-side for my long planned hobby indie project is something I thought about for a very long time since i prefer Java... The Adobe Creative Cloud nailed it for me because now I have Flash Builder & Co. for a fair price. At least the last time I used Flash Develop it was nothing near to NetBeans (my IDE of choice).

yeah I love java! But java has a big barrier when it comes to casual multi platform games and this is what I currently want to develop... I read somewhere (on this board?) that, for huge browser games, java holds a substantial part of the audience off due to technology hassle.

Yeah for mobile browser - this is imo a very sane decision since it won't take that long until smart phones can run normal desktop applications. I don't think flash for mobile browsers is a good thing, most people would deactivate it anyway to save bandwidth and battery life. Adobe Air is like Unity or Java and wont die that easy. Java is popluar although their in-browser-stuff kind of sucks. Adobe has to make money too and I dont think Mobile browser flash monetises well.

Regarding the flash browser plugin, I agree, that the thing might die in the far future, but not until html5 and webgl are broadly available and mature. When this is the case (~5-10 years?) adobe flash will compile to html5/javascript.

Adobe Air is the way to go for mobile. Just a sec and I give you a quote from an official site...
see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html:
Since apps sell better anyway, you deploy your game to mobile app markets via adobe air and to desktop browsers via the plugin.

Epic Games and Unity Technologies invest in Flash deployment, I dont think they do this for the lulz.

BTW Adobe's PR are disastrous, it is crazy that so many people think their support for Flash content on mobile devices has stopped.

dont want to be the party pooper, but i would recommend flash for game development. stage3d is nice and you can easily develop for all mobile platforms (for mobile phones development of adobe air [flash with more access rights and not in the browser] has never stopped.). you can do this with the flex sdk for free or rent the adobe product palette for ~50$ (?) a month (adobe creative coud). Much money but you get all you need at least for 2d game development. adobe flash as a browser plugin might die in not-that-near future. But as long as webgl isn't available on ie, html5 sound is painful and there aren't nice-to-use byte arrays in javascript in all browsers, flash/air is the sane choice.

it would be nice if there would be a way to translate java bytecode to avm2 bytecode. i think there even exist some attempts. as already mentioned there are already some attempts to make flex development with gwt possible (playn, gwt4air...) .

when you want to create client-server-games you should do at least the server part in java. I think nothing beats java in this territory... it's a pity browser java didn't evolve in a way like flash did. i guess the sophisticated flash toolset plays a major role why flash is that successful.

For microbenchmarking you might want to look at http://code.google.com/p/caliper/

Maybe stuff that changes the perspective and attacks the player behind the screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuDYhczbqEQ (at the end there is a creepy crow attack).

Stuff that breaks through the floor (big stuff) and suprise attacks the player.

Let the player figure break through the floor into another level (this makes it creepy to move). In general show the player that he is sometimes not able to control the flow of game.

Shake the view/camera. Maybe some subtle movement of the perspective when danger is near can add some tension too. Condition the player that subtle movement of the camera is dangerous and then play with this belief.

If you really want to create a gruesome experience, exploit signs of sexual violence and other cruelties. Place tortured sacrifices in the dungeon that cry and beg for death.

Let the player fight against other adventurers to make him feel remorseful. Highlight relationships between these npc adventurers and show the player he took a loved one away. He should not be able to avoid this...

A creepy rpg maker game: http://rpgmaker.net/games/2068/

Play Diablo it has some creepy moments, I think sound is really important here.

You should give http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ http://stencyl.com and http://www.yoyogames.com/make a try.

Only when you really want to learn programming you should use java. Then I would go with slick or libgdx.

http://cloud.exitgames.com/ (customizing is .net based)  might be interesting for you.

two interesting IaaS providers: http://opsource.net (builtin VLAN) http://rackspacecloud.com (I used rackspace for a test realtime game server, performance is great, internode communication not that good)

nice

Didn't know about any pastebin functionality. Thanks for your explanation

Java gaming communities are walled gardens, otherwise they would get too big too fast

I hereby request a Show/Hide BBCode that hides its inner text behind a "Show"-Button. Then one can show more unuseful code/stuff without killing a page.



This is my code for a phpBB forum. Maybe you can adjust it for SMF

I don't remember the reasons behind "this.innerText = '';"

I second Orangy Tang's approach. For a small compo @ http://zfx.info I once did it quick and dirty without any state separation. It quickly became a huge mess (AS3 code):
http://pastebin.java-gaming.org/54a6b5d44
small ingame demo how far I got with this

Smoothly snapping the position of the player to a desired "climb" height is very useful against hands in air situations. I've used some "sensors" around the player character to examine which climb animation I have to play.

Maybe some kind of "ambient AI" where surroundings tell characters what they can do might be interesiting. Afaik this is a main aspect of The Sims AI. You could rate all ledge and wall climbing offers and react to the best fit.

Well at least Flex is Open Source and I think many people here used Java before it was Open Source. You also can improve a platform by developing libraries for it. Afaik since the http://www.openscreenproject.org/ you can develop your own Flash player like your own Java VM if you think it is nescessary. I guess it is just a matter of time when the player goes open source too.

yeah maybe, but flash did its job very well for a long time. i think flash will be the browser game solution until ie has some kind of webgl and you don't have to think about audio codecs when developing games with html5. i cannot imagine unity and epic games add flash deployment to their engines for a few years of flash dieing out.

i hope that the end of flash will be the beginning of a html vm spec that allows us to use any language we want for pure html in-browser applications.

disliking flash is like disliking java. dont dislike such powerful technologies, use them, improve them

I think Java is great for game server development. This is a sector with a huge amount of support.
For the client/singleplayer side Java could be great, but there is a lack of support. Afaik Android games are not that profitable compared to iOS. So many people will look for iOS to Android converters and not the other way arround... Java became too complex before lightweight use of such languages/systems was chic.

I often think about converting Java bytecode to AVM2 bytecode. I think it would be great to be able to use Java and its tools for programming Flash. It may even improve the performance of Flash.

I work with eclipse at work and with netbeans at home for my personal projects. Guess what I prefer . IMO Netbeans is much more structured, eclipse is a plugin moloch to me. I love the way Netbeans integrates Maven. No additional ide files just the pom. For building stuff maven is a great help. Just use mvn appassembler and mvn webstart to deploy to any thing you want. It's a pity Google goes with Eclipse, but I think the main reason behind this are corporate hostilities. IntelliJ is on my plan-to-test-list. Its commercial nature bugs me.

JME3 is easy to use w/o the IDE, you don't need it. In one project I made my scenes with Blender and loaded them directly via the extremly useful .blend-file loader.

Maybe stuff from the Mario AI Championship - Level generation track is interesting for you. I think there are some papers about rythm of platformer games and flow stuff. These might help to make generators for levels that appear to have a soul

The one I worked for:
Flying Kabuki Planets You control a spider and navigate through a network of self containing spheres/planets. You can shoot other players/spiders to get "points". We aimed for the kiloplayer achievement, but I think we really have to optimize the game protocol and implement multiserver serving to make this really possible.
client -> Ruby (+ http://www.libgosu.org) [<- Google Protobuf ->] very simple server -> Java (+ http://www.netty.io)
Since it was a collaboration we used Java only for the server...

Game video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETYXdlPm4to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-xYa23zM9A

very nice i had fun, it took me 755s to finish i collected too much resources because i was greedy...

Ah ok, thx. Then I think the randomize order option in bullet is just for special cases. Somebody in the forum mentioned calculaltions related to restitution are improved by random order. I just saw this option is off by default.

yeah I didn't want to imply that the positions of the circles should be moved. I just edited my previous post. just adjust velocities (linear and torque). I think solving via sequential impulses has better results with random order, at least in bullet you can enable random order processing...

broadphase -> select potential collision pairs via sweep and prune or similar
narrowphase -> select actual collision pairs and create contact constraints
constraint solving -> solve contact constraints via impulses x-times in random order (see http://www.bulletphysics.org/mediawiki-1.5.8/index.php?title=Collision_Detection_and_Physics_FAQ#How_do_most_physics_engines_solve_constraints.3F) (edit: I think I misunderstood a bit of the processing, see Rivens post)

http://code.google.com/p/box2d/downloads/detail?name=GDC2006_ErinCatto.zip might be interesting for you

You should mail the user a note that you dont like to look at his avatar. I would not want to annoy people with my avatar (and if he wants to annoy people, you will enlighten his day with your mail ). btw is this eye annoying ?

Ah ic, I only use this list at the bottom of the front page...