Java 6 improvements for gaming

[zingbat]

So what are they? Im reading the improvements list:

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/features.html

Is there anything particulary  amazing in all this?

It looks like we can resize arrays now.

[oNyx]

Speed.

[TheAnalogKid]

These 2 bring big improvements in terms of performance for Java2D based games:

- Improved hardware acceleration on Windows
- Single-threaded rendering for OpenGL pipelines

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[blahblahblahh]

Hallelujah!

    IO Enhancement: Method for discovering free disk space
    Improved diagnosability of OutOfMemoryError
    Programmatic access to network parameters
   Escape analysis

[Orangy Tang]

Oooo...
    Improved user experience in JRE/JDK installer
   Improved desktop integration in Java Web Start
   Improved user experience in Java Plug-in and Java Web Start

Hopefully the whole thing looks much less scary than before. I always get people panicing and clicking "no" to the permissions stuff (and then asking me why it doesn't work).

[kappa]

Applet handling is much better in java 1.6, no longer does java hang your browser with a horrible grey box, it now has a nice loading screen that shows how much of the applet has loaded. Applets were IMO probably one of the biggest things that has given java a bad name and impression that its slow, but i'm glad that it has now improved.

As mentioned above speed is great too, large FPS boost on all games

[Raghar]

Splash screen.

[chaosdeathfish]

But for some reason, still no java plugin or webstart for 64-bit platforms.

[fletchergames]

I've started using Java 6 beta, and I've already noticed the following changes:

- It fixes an annoying white flash that was occuring at the start of all my full-screen applications.
- TextComponents already have copying and pasting text (via shift-insert, etc.) enabled by default, so I don't have to enable it myself.
- I had a NullException randomly occuring at start up because of a problem in my code which didn't have any effect in Java 5.  I figured out that I needed to replace the RepaintManager before going to full-screen mode.  This is an issue specific to my code and didn't actually cause any problems that would affect the user because the NullException was always caught anyways.