Really nice Kev, I like it a lot

I think level 2 is a bit of a leap from level 1 though; but like you say, early days!

Looks nice, but I bet it's not very good for your fingers. Anyone remember the ZX81 keyboard...? 

Hmmm, How can I put this mildly.

Run away.

Seriously. You'll not make a bean.

The only way you can possibly make any money is freelancing for someone else who's got much deeper pockets than you.

I used to make and publish mobile games - one of the first companies to do so. I run a private and anonymous forum where I'd say most of the prominent companies in the mobile world meet, discuss, and compare. Most of the posts are about corrupt aggregators, who don't pay, or give your games away for free, or even change the graphics in your game and sell it as their own.

Do something else.

Not many people have discovered the Joy of Macs

You could look at Unity as well, as that has a web player plugin that's becoming quite popular. Downside is that the builder app is Mac only.

Trying to port Torque to Java sounds like a recipe for pain to me

Looking at the Lander sample, it certainly seems easy to code for - and it's all driven from Eclipse, too.

But, aside from the millions Google are throwing at us in the competition, I'm still skeptical there's any money to be made - especially if content is channelled through the same dodgy bastards that handle j2me stuff (I mean aggregators and operators, plus all the pirates that sell on content to/via them).

Have Nokia and SE committed to using it? If so, where's it going to sit alongside j2me, brew and flash lite?

Yeah, there's an idea - how about *paying* someone, Chris?     

Just sits waiting for me - Safari and Firefox.

Managed DX is dead, that's why -- MS don't support it any more.

So your choices are DX or XNA....and they're updated every quarter.

At the moment XNA is only for people wanting to see their code on a 360, perhaps in the hope that it'll appear on XBLA.

As it stands you can't use it for PC games -- there's too many issues with all the different components your customer/player needs to install, and even then sometimes it doesn't work. Then there's the DX9 / Shader 2.0 requirement, which precludes a lot of Casual gamers.

Anyway, you certainly can't use it for releasing commercial games - I know, I was the first person to do it - and we had to withdraw the XNA version of the game because of these issues.

Having said that though, long term, I think XNA is the better bet for making PC games, particularly 3D ones. Once MS get all those runtimes on people's machines through Windows Update.

But that's only PC games, sometime in the future. With Java/LWJGL you can target PC and Mac (who cares about Linux, really, commercially) *now*.

Depends what you want to do, really. 

Ah yes! Typing ctrl+space allows you to carry on where you left off! 

Going to have to find something else to swear at now 

Ah, just had another go.

Type fred, dot.

Start typing the member name, then type something that it can't match. Popup disappears, delete what you've typed and try again.

Really annoying!

That's weird, it happens to me on both PC and Mac, as far back as I can remember. I don't think I've changed any options - especially not on both machines. I must admit I haven't tried Cas' ctrl+space way of doing things - I'll give that a spin now

Nope, the autocomplete in Eclipse sucks. An example: Say we have an object "fred". Type fred, followed by a full stop. The autocomplete pops up. Type the first few chars of the member you want, then say you make a mistake and hit backspace. You lose the lot, and have to delete what you've typed back to "fred" and start again.

I suppose I might be unique here in that I'm not bothered about refactoring, forms, guis and whatnot - I just want something to help me write terse, tight code quickly without having to constantly have to look up member names and so on. And when things go wrong I want a debugger which lets me quickly get to the root of the problem, quickly inspect variables, objects and so on. Currently with the state of Java IDEs at the moment I'm not getting this.


Or maybe their faults unfold when you have several large projects over several platforms and a couple of hundred targets


I think a dual-core with a gig of ram should be enough for a glorified text editor


Yeah I've installed it but yet to use it enough to form an opinion.

I use Eclipse, and it usually causes me to shout the "C" word a few times each hour - usually because the autocomplete is a pain in the arse. Someone should plonk the developers down in front of a copy of Visual Studio and show them how it's done

Having said that, Eclipse is the best of the bunch. A not very good bunch - why are Java IDEs so poor?

I've just tried JCreator, and as an editor it's really nice - although it's a bit thick at picking up new changes in other files. The uninstaller was ran after I found a bug where the debugger would file lock the project's jar file; causing me to shut down and restart each time.

Perhaps Eclipse is trying to be all things to all men. I keep meaning to try one of these programmer's editor applications and hook it up to javac, jar and proguard, and see if I can get the best of all worlds....

Any recommendations for such a beast? Preferably native code though - Java IDEs etc eat up too much memory and are generally too slow for my liking.

True.

If I was still in the UK (or anywhere civilised) I'd be doing contract work for mega bucks, and I know a few ex-mobile developers doing the same.

I think half the problem is that developers are typically creative types, and not business/money men.

I read somewhere that UK games biz programmer salaries are the same today as they were 10 years ago. That sucks.

Hmm, no different to a normal drawImage (as far as I can tell).....

Just to be clear, what I'm trying to do is, for example:

Source pixel RGB: 128, 128, 128
Dest pixel RGB:        64, 200, 64

Result:                      192, 255, 192

Ah thanks

I looked into SRC_OVER, but I thought it just did a normal "destructive" blit....

I'll bung that code in and see what happens

OK I give up   Googled, looked through the forum, and the answer eludes me....

I want to blit an image on the screen, then draw another image on top of it.

With the second image though, I want to use an ADD rop - in other words, the RGB of the second image is added to the destination (rather than the source replacing the dest, with transparency, as normal). To make things more complicated the second image has alpha, so it's semi transparent.

Is there a nice easy render op mode I can set to do this?

Thanks,

M

Fantastic stuff Kev, I'm looking into all this physics stuff as well at the moment.

It's doing my head in, so hopefully I'll find more sense in your source

Well done

It's so frustrating when you can't find a simple answer to something, without wading through examples wondering if this particular way is the best way to code things...

Anyway, during my googling I came across the 4K competition. Of course! There's bound to be a tight, efficient way of doing things in an application in there somewhere I thought - and I found the answers I needed in the Billiard4K game. So thanks to Luis Javier López Arredondo for saving my sanity!

Blobbit Push is up and running now - just need to integrate jorbis and then I'll see if this JET compiler doobry is any good 

Thanks again 

Great, many thanks!

I've been coding in Java since 1996, but always with applets. I feel like I'm starting all over again! 

Now I'm struggling with loading images:

        img = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage( getClass().getResource( "/fred.jpg" ) );

...there doesn't seem to be a media tracker to wait for images to load...?  img returns with width and height as -1.

Also, what's the minimumm framework I need to extend from - I just have "... extends Canvas". Do I need a JFrame or JPanel?

In the meantime I'll continue Googling 

Hi,

I'm in the process of converting my games from applets to applications, and I've become stuck. I feel like a newbie all over again! )

OK, so I have an app, with of course a main() entry point. main has to be declared static to be seen, but that causes me all sorts of problems with what I can do inside main()....

Here's a code snippet:


    public static void main(String args[])   
    {
          gInnards = new Innards( this );

                . . . .
    }

The problem is, I'm not allowed to pass 'this' - or anything runtime generated - within main().

So, what's the cleanest way of letting the Innards class find out the reference to the calling class..?

Thanks 

Thanks

Yeah the loading time is a problem...Cas mentioned writing a pre-loader, so at least something appears on the screen whilst the jar is loading.

It's on my to-do list, along with bundling JVMs and making native code builds

Blobbit Push

Blimey, that took a long time!  We finished the game in about October, then we tweaked, added, then tweaked some more!

I think it's a more complete, polished game for it though. Let's hope that extra effort translates into sales, eh? :lol:

Basically, it's Sokoban, but with enemies. And it gets quite hard! Stoo was the level design meister, revealing a sadistic tendency I never knew he had!

Please give it a go, I'd like to know what you think of it

There's a proper web site on the way, but I couldn't wait any longer!

Wow I didn't realise that 1.3 was that old! 

Back in 2000 we were doing Blastian and all that 3D multiplayer stuff, all in 1.1 - trying to pursuade players to run Windows 2000 and not Win98....

Anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip and I'll definitely be using 1.4 from now on

Thanks!

M

Sorry, but I couldn't believe someone would get so uptight about me posting in two forums.

I'll delete the other thread and the remark, and then we can all calm down.

I put it in both forums as it's both business related and technical.

 

Hi,

We're about to release our latest game, but to enable us to use persistent storage we're having to build against 1.4; up till now we've release 1.3 compatible games.

So, by making it dependant on the later version, how much of our audience are we losing?

The game will be released as an applet/jar, run from a web page. I won't be bothering with WebStart as I think it causes more problems than it fixes!

Many thanks,

Mark

Not so. I squeeze every ounce of performance out of the phone with GR++, and there's little if no overhead with the 'abstraction'.

I don't use any preprocessing at all.