Great article! Both entertaining and informative.

What control does EA have over anything? They have power over EA internal game studios and their publishing relationships with devs like Bungie... That level of power seems very modest.


EA only makes money on new games they create or games they help fund/create.

Valve rarely makes actual games and is now largely making money by charging rents on games from other developers.

They are still praised to the heavens. Half Life 1/2 were completely mediocre FPS games but I never felt the need to object to other people enjoying it.

I do object to this notion that Steam has some rightful ownership of the marketplace of all PC games. I am not calling them "evil", that is unnecessarily emotional and dramatic. Steam is just grabbing more power and money than is healthy for the overall ecosystem. If I ever make a game, I don't want Valve taking a cut of the revenue, and I don't like this attitude that Valve somehow deserves to be the primary gatekeeper of the entire ecosystem.


I don't see a valid reason to claim that either EA or Valve is immoral.

I do see a reason to claim that Valve is taking more control and money from the overall PC gaming ecosystem than makes sense. I'd like to see better, more dev friendly options. EA really doesn't do anything like this.

These are all very simple features relatively easy to implement.

Ideally, some awesome group of programmers would build a free or nearly-free Amazon/Google cloud hosted alternative and liberate game developers from having to beg for crumbs, sign over rights, and hand over large cuts of revenue

Wow.

I see Steam has gotten several things right:

1) Central service to manage licenses for all your games
2) Central service to browse your game collection and launch a game
3) Central automated patching
4) Ability to redownload on to any PC
5) Central sales and promotions
6) Auto recommendation of similar games.
7) Central Achievement/Trophy type system for all games
See what friends have purchased.

Is that a comprehensive list?

Almost all of these features are standard on smartphone/tablet/console marketplaces but have been absent from PCs.

Traditional *nix app repos has a few of these, but is non-game centric, and is for free, non-licensed software only.

It seems like the effort in building/maintaining a service like this is relatively low to the amount of money they are raking in. This seems ripe for a good competitor.

It is outrageous that Valve is making demands of an indie developer and collecting a share of the revenue on a completely externally developed game.

Why, do you support this service? Why grovel to them for crumbs? This is an outrage!

How much control do they take in pricing?

If you also sell your game through other channels, are you allowed to set the Steam price to reflecte the revenue share taken by Steam?

Are you allowed to openly discuss the terms of the contract? Are you even allowed to answer these questions?

What other rights do you need to sign away to participate?

There is a communication gap. Of course, iOS can't run an official JRE and probably never will. We were talking about app app-embeddable like Mono that don't need official Apple approval. There is nothing stopping people from making an app-embeddable Java runtime that runs on iOS. The JavaFX group is already working on something like this and hopefully it won't be limited to JavaFX.

Can I use this to run on iOS or a game console? Any links?

If I wasn't pursuing some non programming passions (medical field related), I would try to build an embeddable Scala compiler/runtime to compete with Mono. There is a major unfulfilled demand for that right now.

The whole advantage of Mono isn't speed, it actually runs slower than Microsoft's official CLR VM and the Java VM, it's portability. The Mono runtime can be embedded in any C/C++ project for any platform and run C# code. Java/Scala do not have a fleshed out option like that and are limited to platforms with full JREs (Win/Mac/Linux). Someone *could* write an embeddable Java/Scala compiler/runtime like the Mono guys did for C#, but that's non-trivial and no one has done that. Heck, the Mono guys could make their runtime platform neutral and support Java/Scala source code, but the people behind that project are too militantly pro-Microsoft to do something like that.


If you are ok with being limited to Win/Mac/Linux and writing your own middleware on top of OpenGL, Java/Scala are perfect. If you want more fleshed out middleware options and a larger community or a better path to iOS and consoles, C++/C# is a better bet. Personally, I'm cheering for Java/Scala to improve their prospects.

Obviously, lots of money is needed to pay 200+ salaried employees like Unity Technologies has. But what is preventing that kind of money from reaching a Java based game engine company? Or why are the people who are able to obtain that type of money not choosing Java?

Why are the more serious efforts choosing C++ and .NET rather than Java? Part of it is runtime issues, the way Mono lets you embed .NET in a platform neutral C++ app, while Java doesn't do that as well.

C++/.NET have tons of hobby projects on the level of jME and Ardor3D as well as the big guns like Unity and Unreal.

Just glancing at the websites of Unity3d and JME and looking at the galleries, showcases, documentation, tutorials, and forums: JME looks like more of a hobby project while Unity looks far more professional. Unity has tons of games I've actual heard of and actually bought. I would never have heard of JME or any of the games written in it if I wasn't a Java programmer. The forums of Unity3d.com alone look more active with serious game devs than this site.

I'm rooting for Java and JME because I love the more open community aspect of it. I love that I can use my favorite language, Scala, all my favorite JVM libraries and tools, and my favorite IDE, IntelliJ or maybe Eclipse for Scala work, and do development from my Linux workstation.

Unity is tied in with Mono: personally, I dislike working in that community, so even if the game engine tech is great, I don't want to use that product. But realistically, that product is just far more developed and seems to be far more successful. Honestly, I am not doing game development at the moment, and I haven't used either jME or unity3d as a dev, so I'm not making any claims at that level.

I actually have zero experience with Java 3D work. I really should have qualified that. There are Java 3D engines (jME, etc) but why don't we see anything that really competes with Unreal or Unity?

The community is almost non-existent weak. Cas, you are one of very few Java game devs. Even successful devs like Notch have jumped ship to normal C++ tools. This is a relatively fringe and disorganized group. Java games would need some larger sponsors to take off.

Cas, you should know: what else is limiting the success of JVM tools in game development?

The Java 8 runtime has large performance enhancements. I've personally run benchmarks on personal projects and seen the delta between C++ cut in half.

The language and API changes in Java 8 are nice, but it's still way behind Scala. If you want an elegant language and library, just use that.

Personally, I'm hoping for:

- better runtime support: iOS + non-Dalvik Android + Google NaCl + PlayStation Consoles.
- Better 3D rendering performance. I've heard Java OpenGL bindings are limited.
- Better community. The Java game dev community is pretty quiet. I'd like to see more activity.

I've said it before: JavaFX is great for data and widget-centric GUIs with checkboxes and grid controls. For game development you want an API like OpenGL that gives you a way to render polygons with hardware acceleration. JavaFX just isn't designed for that.

IntelliJ has long been my favorite IDE for Java and especially Java/Maven work.

I just downgraded from IntelliJ Ultimate 11 to the free community edition of IntelliJ 12 and I'm shocked that I am not missing any features. The only major missing feature from the free version is JavaScript functionality. You can write JavaScript with the community edition, but you miss out on all the nice IDE features.

The official Scala IDE from typesafe is an Eclipse plugin, so for my Scala work, I use that. IntelliJ has decent Scala support, but without recalling specifics, I like the official Scala IDE better and haven't had a reason to move back.

I think this forum is extremely open to Scala. Scala lives in the same ecosystem of libraries and deals with the same runtime issues as Java. Making a Scala lib usable from Java takes work (look at Akka/Play).

Scala is a much more elegant language than Java (or C# or C++). I generally use it whenever I have the choice. One exception is if I had to do a simple Android project, I'd probably stick with basic Java due to tool/runtime issues.

Very cruel Cas.

The safe presumption is that the official SDK is completely C based and software teams can use any other language or toolset as long as it can access the C APIs and compiles to native code. In the past, C# programmers have had more success at writing to external C APIs and using embedded VMs. Recently, Oracle has started to show some interest in embedded VMs and supporting non PCs so hopefully this will improve. I would kill to see good games written in Java or better yet, Scala or Clojure. I'd even be happy to see Haskell games a reality.

Java is *way* more elegant and cleaner than C++ on many, many levels.

Java is often simpler from a tooling/debugging perspective than Scala. However, Scala is a much more elegant language and I would chose Scala over Java for certain tasks.

The Java community. Ultimately, you can generally do whatever you want in any language you want, but a big factor is the community around the tools. Python has an amazing community for science type work. Java has an amazing community for distributed computing, data-centric workflows, build tools, etc. Games and graphics are actually one of Java's weaker sides, but it is still what I would choose over C++.

You can just download Minecraft and other Java games. I don't see a good reason for a bank to use a Java applet. I guess the Chrome model of always blocking until the user explicitly allows is appropriate.

I'm a huge fan of the Java development ecosystem, but the Java applet web browser plugin seems like an idea passed it's time.

What does anyone actually use the Java web plugin for?

Sure, that's obvious. But programming language platforms are driven more by how well they let you access your user base rather than programmer level concerns. Programmers generally don't like JavaScript/ECMAScript because of the language syntax itself, but because of how easy it is to deploy and reach users.

ActionScript: Yes, this is really popular too. I forgot this one.

C#: I definitely didn't forget this. For games, C# is definitely more popular than Java, but less than C++. However, C# and Xamarin/Mono are associated with a certain type of Microsoft-militancy that I'm not comfortable with. I give the Xamarin guys huge credit for making viable C# inroads with things like PlayStation Suite and Google NaCl and I'd love to see Java related companies and players more active in that.


Java is extremely popular in certain communities. Game development is just not one of them. The entire big data community is largely centered around Java. Much of the cutting edge search community is Java-centric. The alt-language community is extremely exciting and very JVM centric. There are also a ton of boring crusty legacy Enterprise IT jobs using Java.


If I was more passionate about this, I would focus on one of two areas:

- Work on custom Java VM's to run on iOS or PlayStation or google NaCl
- Work on a Scala-centric 3D game engine, that shows extremely high performance, latest OpenGL features, full Mac/Windows/Linux/Android support, and a high level of programming elegance that C++/C#/Java developers are not used to.

C++ is really terrible for cross-platform development. The core language is 90% full cross platform, but the instant you add networking or GUI or 3D or an installer or multi-threading, you generally use extremely platform dependent libraries. On top of this, the C++ dev environment on Linux is exceptionally tricky and difficult to work with.

Java seems to have a real opportunity here:

- it has excellent runtime support on Windows/Mac/Linux
- you can easily bundle a JRE so that you don't expect your users to understand and maintain that themselves.
- Runtime performance is excellent. It's generally only ~20% slower than C++. I know performance is *extremely* complicated and not so easily summarized, but that is a reasonable high level approximation.
- The dev tools and experience is dramatically better in almost every way. The language is much nicer, it is more complete (stuff like networking and threading is built-in), IDEs are nicer, build tools are nicer (Gradle + SBT are far better than makefiles), debuggers and profilers are better. Debugging memory leaks, and array out of bound writes is orders of magnitudes better.
- Scala. Scala is dramatically more elegant than the Java/C# breed of languages. This has practical benefits in terms of maintenance and higher level reasoning as well. Many more builder type programmers don't appreciate this type of high level stuff, but some do, and I suspect this will grow.

The negatives are:

- Java has a bad image. People don't like it for only semi-valid reasons. For example, people had some bad experience with the Java web plugin, which is valid, but are soured off on the whole Java ecosystem which really isn't valid. People also have bad experiences with "enterprise" Java or JavaEE or JPA or Spring or Struts, which I think is valid, but is turned off of everything else, which isn't valid.
- There is no momentum behind Java. 95% of the game programming community is primarily C++ or JavaScript or Objective-C. Java is off the radar. People don't understand it and aren't excited about it and don't even learn it.
- No game programming infrastructure for Java.
- Java doesn't have a good route to iOS or consoles. Even C++ is better for these.

Anyway, I fell like the Java community should seize the opportunity while it is here.

I can't stand Microsoft Office either.

Personally, for spreadsheets, I like Google Docs: launches quickly, closes quickly, super responsive, clean and easy to use GUI, plus the cloud hosted and live sharing features. Just perfect!

For docs and slides, I prefer LaTeX. You can get precisely what you want, the editors are lighting fast and simple, and the whole workflow is well suited to the mind of a programmer. And final output .pdf documents look *beautiful*. Particularly math equations, but even basic text and tables look eye wateringly gorgeous. You can also get excellent chemical symbol notation, scientific unit output, electric schematics, diagrams, auto formatted bibliographies and citations, and pretty much everything else. Microsoft Office generates junk in comparison.

I disagree on both counts:

For server work: Scala on the JVM is substantially better than Java for the programmers that can pass the learning curve.

For desktop apps, I believe it's split:

Some apps seem best done in C: Text editor, music player, web browser, chat client. The OS-native GUI widgets and lack of runtime baggage of the VM is nice.

For my mega-IDES (IntelliJ and Eclipse) and tools like GePhi which I use for graph analysis, JVM seems to work better. My suspicion is the developer tools helps them manage and organize the complexity better.

A lot of the more complex C/C++ desktop apps I use seem to be a mess: OpenOffice/LibreOffice is one high profile example. I suspect that the team would have had better luck cleaning that up and improving it if it was in Java.

Games is another big category. It seems that C/C++ are successful at doing multi-platform iOS/Android/Console work, but for Linux/Mac/Win, C/C++ is just awful. I suspect that JVM is really untapped in it's potential for desktop games. I believe the dev tools are much better, you have to deal with way less hacks than C/C++, and the performance is close enough to C/C++. The downside to JVM for games is that it's mobile and console story is terrible. Even for Android, I'm skeptical that the Dalvik code path is performance competitive with the C/C++ NDK

That looks extremely minor. In normal threading-type code, I don't think that will matter much at all.

Now, for heavy higher order function usage with lots of map/flatMap, the simpler lambda syntax is very important.


You're right. Akka has a more complete Future and some other workflow stuff that is usable without a fully distributed setup.

AFAIK, none of java.util.concurrent is very dependent on lambda expressions. Can you elaborate on where that would really benefit?

From my limited understanding, Akks is more on the level of JMS as a high level cross computer message queueing system. java.util.concurrent is much lower level and works with threads/pools/tasks.

Dart is compiled into JavaScript which runs on all major browsers. No one is deploying raw Dart source. The native Chrome support is a development feature so you can dev/debug in native Dart and compile/deploy with compiled JavaScript.

JavaScript is being used as a byte code. People have been compiling CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Dart, Java, C#, and now Microsoft TypeScript to JavaScript.

You seem to be implying that JavaScript established it's dominance through the idiosyncracies of the evolution of the web and browsers and computing devices and not because it won some pure intellectual best language competition... This is beyond obvious. Most technical standards are like that. It's hard to rally all the competing players together to push new replacement standards. Look at x86; many have pointed out flaws and many have designed much better ISAs, but still people have found ways to make new chips with cutting edge designs that satisfy legacy x86 compatability baggage. Everyone can point out flaws with JavaScript, but many are finding ways to provide cutting edge dev tools and runtimes around the legacy compatability issues.