An excellent Mahjong game for MAC and Windows, thanks to JOGL and JAVA 6.

[golgoth77]

Hello!

I have finished a very good Mahjong game for Mac and Windows

It uses JOGL and the fixed OpenGL pipeline for rendering and the Bass audio library bindings for sound (it is why it runs only on Windows and Mac).

The only visual effects are some custom bump mapping and some texture projection in the Halloween theme.

I spent a lot of time programming the PartyKewl particle library for Java but it is not included in the soft because the excellent graphist left the project one year ago. However you can use it for your game: no memory fragmentation, 32 bytes per particle, a good editor...

Cheers,
Bernard LERAT.
http://www.in-poculis.com/site/mahjong.html
Note: If someone could do a good sound library in Java it would be very cool.

[zammbi]

Dam looking good.
I don't usually play these kinds of game but I think I'll give this one a go 

[princec]

Very slick indeed. Have you got a webstarty / Linux one too? <edit>Ah just noticed you're using BASS.

Cas

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

[Juriy]

Tried this one. Looks really nice. Of course having to download 50+ megs to play mahjong is a bit painful...

Few more usability issues:
get rid of standard look and feel, it's too easy to recognize. You can develop your own L&F with Synth or take some third-party solution like Substance.

2. The timer is counting while I still read the game manual.

3. It would be great to have a way to reduce window size. Some of us are testing your game in office, you know ;-)

Generally - cool graphics, nice game. Too bad I don't enjoy mahjong :-)

[gouessej]

No Linux version because of BASS audio library. I'm fed up with this kind of limitations. Why did you choose this library whereas there are other cross-platform library to handle sound?

[golgoth77]

Thanks for the critics.

There is an existing WebStart version but it uses an old JOGL version and the UVs have to be corrected. I'll rebuild one in the following weeks.

>No Linux version because of BASS audio library.
>I'm fed up with this kind of limitations. Why did you choose this library
>whereas there are other cross-platform library to handle sound?
I completely agree with you. If I choosed Java, it was for the portability... But all the other libraries that I tried had little latency on Mac G4 or old Windows plateforms. Give me a really good audio library in Java and I'll implement it. But I'm afraid that it doesn't exists yet.

[princec]

Not had any problems with OpenAL on Mac OS myself...

Cas

[golgoth77]

Isn't it painful to add .ogg or .mp3 support to OpenAL?

Maybe that I'll give a try to OpenAL in some months, but for the moment it works on the 2 most popular plateforms so I won't touch it. Unless I find a library over OpenAL containing just: play(), stop(), free() for .ogg and .wav files

[oNyx]

>Isn't it painful to add .ogg or .mp3 support to OpenAL?

Ogg isn't that hard with JOrbis. And mp3... why would you want that anyways?

[erikd]

I never seem to have been able to implement reliable streaming using OpenAL. Works on some machines, doesn't on others (inexplicable OpenAL exceptions).
Code that's been posted here and there to stream .ogg files over OpenAL has that behaviour too. Apart from that, I personally quite dislike the OpenAL API (matter of taste maybe) and some implementations on Linux are flakey IIRC.

That said, I found that latency in JavaSound has been greatly improved since Java6 (at least on Windows). Maybe JavaSound deserves a second chance?

Oh, great looking screenshots BTW I'll try this out when I'm at home.

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

[golgoth77]

>oNyx
>Ogg isn't that hard with JOrbis. And mp3... why would you want that anyways?
.ogg or .mp3, if I have a solution with .ogg it's perfect because In-Poculis Mahjong uses only .ogg and .wav.
JOrbis was my first try but I got latency. All the solutions that I tried had problems on Mac or Windows.

Two months ago, I had 2 different libraries at the same time to make the sound work on all plateforms. But one week before releasing the game, I played it 15 minutes and a sound module crashed -> I said to myself: stop all this non professionnal work and take something that works. Hence, I choose BASS.

>erikd
Thank you to understand my problems
For me, JavaSound is not an option because the game must use Java 5 to run on Mac 

[gouessej]

Thanks for the critics.

There is an existing WebStart version but it uses an old JOGL version and the UVs have to be corrected. I'll rebuild one in the following weeks.

>No Linux version because of BASS audio library.
>I'm fed up with this kind of limitations. Why did you choose this library
>whereas there are other cross-platform library to handle sound?
I completely agree with you. If I choosed Java, it was for the portability... But all the other libraries that I tried had little latency on Mac G4 or old Windows plateforms. Give me a really good audio library in Java and I'll implement it. But I'm afraid that it doesn't exists yet.

I use only JOGG and JORBIS, it works fine. The engine "EasyWay" is cross-platform and uses JOGG, JORBIS and JavaSound directly sometimes and is compatible with a lot of formats.

[Mr. Gol]

First of all, your presentation is really really good. Although in my personal opinion Mahjong games are incredibly boring, I still downloaded this to check it out just because the screenshots look so amazing. Then your website also looked great, and the most important information (the download button) was also the most easy to find. Very, very well done.

As for the game itself, well, I'm still not really a fan of Mahjong

One little detail though, I see you're using the hideous default Swing look-and-feel in your menus. Please add a simple UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName()); in there, it makes things just look soooo much better.