have anyone of you earn money from applets games?

[noblemaster]

Wow! Congratulations 

I wasn't aware Google ads could generate that much money!!!

[princec]

Mmm, sweet game. So slick I thought it was Flash. So it just goes to show that it can be done...

Cas

[oNyx]

I've been making some money off of this game:
http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/
Nothing near DesktopTD, but the revenue of the last two months combined has been 4 digits.

For the curious, of the clients with Java installed, this is what I'm seeing:
Java 1.1 - 1%
Java 1.3 - <1%
Java 1.4 - 9%
Java 1.5 - 58%
Java 1.6 - 32%
Java 1.7 - one or two hits

Nice game! And thanks for sharing your stats.

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[quixote_arg]

One question: what kind of marketing and/or promotion have you done to advertise your game?

[CaptainJester]

I've been making some money off of this game:
http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/
Nothing near DesktopTD, but the revenue of the last two months combined has been 4 digits.

For the curious, of the clients with Java installed, this is what I'm seeing:
Java 1.1 - 1%
Java 1.3 - <1%
Java 1.4 - 9%
Java 1.5 - 58%
Java 1.6 - 32%
Java 1.7 - one or two hits

Nice game.  I clicked an ad for you.

ps.  I would also like to know what kind of marketing you did too.  Thanks.

[brackeen]

I submitted it to a few portals. JayIsGames was first - they like to link to new, interesting web games, and other portals watch JayIs for new content. JayIs didn't feature it, but instead put it on a Friday "Link Dump" (so yeah, the linked got "dumped").

From there, it got picked up by portals I've never even heard of, like 123spill.no. To this day a large portion of my hits come from Norway.

Unfortunately Digg's "playable web games" category didn't pick it up. That's probably the holy grail.

Licensing the game can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it can bring in immediate cash. On the other hand, if you license a web game to somegameportal.com, and a popular site like Digg links to somegameportal.com instead of your site, you've probably lost money over time.

Nice game.  I clicked an ad for you.

Well, cool, I'm glad you like the game, but clicking ads because you like the game is a bad idea - Google will shut down my account if it detects "fake" clicks. So please only click an ad if you really are interested in the ad

[Bad Sector]

So slick I thought it was Flash. So it just goes to show that it can be done...

This line alone proves my point that Java web games tend to look ugly and the image many people (including java developers) think exactly that ... :-(

[oNyx]

Well, yea... antialiasing and translucent images are damn slow after all. And rotation is slow and ugly. You can't do additive blending and all that. With build-in OpenGL support from the beginning it would have been a different thing. Java would have totally wiped the floor with Flash and Director.

Nowadays you can use lwjgl or jogl, but then you get some scary warning message and it doesn't work on many machines. Eg it doesn't work on mine and that issue will never be fixed, since ati stopped updating the driver for this card (9100) long ago. (Usual apps work fine tho.)

Sigh. It's divine punishment for not buying an nvidia card, I guess.

If you work around those issues a java game can be pretty neat. Eg Milpa runs perfectly smooth on my super lame 500mhz machine. That wouldn't be impossible with Flash (there aren't *any* flash games that run smooth). You also have a lot more processing power at your disposal... or... mh... more calculations you can do within a second. If you do something nice with that, you'll have some advantage.

Can't really think of anything that would fit the bill. Except danmaku with rather poor graphics. Or something with physics (and poor graphics). Or pixel art all over the place, that but that would be too expensive/time consuming.

[brackeen]

Good to hear Milpa runs well on your 500Mhz machine. I tried it on a test machine that's 500Mhz and the game ran below 60fps in some cases. So I'm guessing you have a faster bus speed.

What makes it work well on slower machines is dirty rectangles - only drawing what's changed. I'm pretty sure Flash does this too.

Would anyone be interested if I open-sourced the engine behind Milpa? I wouldn't mind getting some extra eyeballs on this thing, and  people creating 2D web games might find it useful. Fast image rendering (not Java2D), fractional positioning, alpha blending, bilinear scaling/rotation, dirty rectangles, easy animation API. Additive blending is getting integrated into the architecture (it currently works great on a black background). It's not a game framework - there's no tilemaps or collision detection. Just 2D rendering and animation.

[phu004]

Hello brackeen, I would certainly be interested in looking at the source code behind Milpa.  I used to studied the soruce code from your "Developing game in Java" book, , it helped me a lot to build my first texture mapped 3d enviroment in Java. I learned a hell lot of crazy tricks from it to speed up the rendering. I would be very excited if you can release more source code of your games.

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[CommanderKeith]

Hi David Brackeen, I've read and liked your book too.  In this forum it's often recommended to people asking about good books.

So these rendering algorithms of yours are neither OpenGL nor Java2D but software-based?  Sounds very interesting, I'd love to see the source.

Thanks,
Keith

[keldon85]

And even if you don't open source it you can still turn it into a reusable library!

EDIT: good book; I like the fact that you gave the software approach, which is always better to give. Although I personally think beginners must be able to understand and think in terms of affine transformations, point=Vector+Origin*TransformationMatrix (aka Plane) and the like, then they could easily apply their teachings to [say] Mode 7 graphics and Ray Casting

[bitshit]

Would anyone be interested if I open-sourced the engine behind Milpa? I wouldn't mind getting some extra eyeballs on this thing, and  people creating 2D web games might find it useful. Fast image rendering (not Java2D), fractional positioning, alpha blending, bilinear scaling/rotation, dirty rectangles, easy animation API. Additive blending is getting integrated into the architecture (it currently works great on a black background). It's not a game framework - there's no tilemaps or collision detection. Just 2D rendering and animation.

I'd also be very interested in the library behind milpa... like the keith and phu400 I also read your book

[quixote_arg]

I am extremely interested in the engine source code!

Although I haven't read your book  ...

[appel]

Yes, I think I would be interested in seeing the source-code behind Milpa.

It loaded very quickly, and looks really nice.

[CaptainJester]

Ditto here on geting the code.

Thanks.

[brackeen]

Awesome. I'm busy with "real" work this week but I'll post around these parts when I release something, probably next week. I'll do a proper release with source control and such.

[tau]

I'm really interested to look at the code and learn! The game really ran smooth on my mid-range computer under JRE 1.6. I was about to code my next game in Flash, but this game shows that same effects can be done in Java! Besides, Java penetration is 98%, which is about the same as Flash.

Thank you!

[keldon85]

Well next week I will be releasing a Java version of LockJaw; at the moment the graphics demo for the game is running at around 25% CPU on my 1.2Ghz Mobile [laptop] PIII. I'm hoping that it will be able to run on at least a 400Mhz PII