Automated webstart-maker: need game authors

[TheAnalogKid]

I can but it's time consuming doing all those tests. Have you found something on your side?

[TheAnalogKid]

blah3,

I've uploaded the necessary jars for Windows version of the game only. 2 problems:

1.  I can't set any system property, which might cause bad performance on some systems. Especially for translucent images.

2.  No way to set the main class of the game. You assume that the jar contains a manifest file describing the main class. I'm used to specify the main class in the jnlp file.

Could you delete the Mighty Bubbles Demo entry please? I also need to update the descrition of the game since it contains crap data at the end.

Thanks

[blahblahblahh]

Now that it's easter, I'm hoping to have a good few days to just sit down and do some longstanding needed fixes for JGF.

I'll be starting with the open-files/out-of-buffer-memory problems (ugh), moving on to analog's problems, then hoping (if I'm brave enough) to get a full libraries-upload working, and then move on to more interesting things and/or fixing some layout issues with MSIE being too crap to let you edit articles etc.

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

[moogie]

I have a bug report:

One of the JARs being uploaded caused the following error:

Referer URL:/controllers/release-game

Throwable:java.lang.NumberFormatException: null

Line Source File
436 In Integer.java
518 ...called from Integer.java
231 ...called from GameReleaseController.java
141 ...called from CMSControllersService.java
117 ...called from bExpeditionGeos.java
38 ...called from Geos.java
62 ...called from HttpPostControllerService.java
251 ...called from bAsynchronousService.java
330 ...called from bModule.java
534 ...called from Thread.java


This seems to have corrupted the database entry for the game as it now says that the game is 302018 bytes.

The game in question: http://javagamesfactory.org/views/view-game?name=AnacondaNet


I have created a new game page and have called it Anaconda_Net... i am currently uploading to it now. I will let you know if this one works correctly.

[blahblahblahh]

Thanks.

However, this is bizarre. Either a very strange bug in the HTTP parser, or I suspect this is a browser problem (maybe a bug in the javascript processing, or an incompatibility between your browser and the js source?). What happened is that - apparently - one of the form fields which has a value of 0 and increases by 1 every time you add a nativelibrary *instead* had a value of "null". Hence the exception when I try to find out the value of it .

Even more weird is that this only affected you once. That would suggest to me that it's a browser bug. I know that Mozilla, for instance, still has some major bugs in it's javascript execution, such that you can execute the same script 5 times in a row and get different results.

Anyway, I'll add a specific workaround for this, that catches that possibility and prints a "your browser might be broken; please email me your browser version - but try again because it might work second time" message, and then leave it and see if it happens again.

It must be said that I'm not a js programmer - but then again there's only 20 lines of it, it's all legal syntax, and how bad can js execution engines be?

PS: Could you confirm whether this FORCED you to create a new game, or if you just did so anyway to see if you could? For most things, you should just be able to try again a second time without creating a new game...

[moogie]

Well i am using IE 6 so i guess that is the culprit

It did force me to make a new game as when i re-loaded the game information page it did not come up with a link the alpha release at first.

After i had already created the new game i noticed that the link to the alpha release was back on the old game, however it still was giving errorneously high file size.

I am only on a 28.8k modem so it takes a heck of a long time to upload to see if the changes worked, so i decided to stick with the known working new game.

If at all possible i would like to be able to delete the old game.

[blahblahblahh]

Well i am using IE 6 so i guess that is the culprit

The only MSIE I test with is 6, because none of the others support HTML+CSS, and even 6 doesn't support it fully. I've never had any problems with uploads - only with mozilla .

It did force me to make a new game as when i re-loaded the game information page it did not come up with a link the alpha release at first.

Interesting. That should *only* happen if it thinks you are not logged-in, or if you are logged-in as someone *different* from the person who created the game (only the author has permission to upload new versions).

I am only on a 28.8k modem so it takes a heck of a long time to upload to see if the changes worked, so i decided to stick with the known working new game.

Fair enough. I asked because most people so far who have problems just create an entire new game, and that then means the names are wrong, and I have to login and delete the old ones .

I've been considering making it so you can only create one game at a time, and need to get it accepted by an admin before you can create another, just to avoid having lots appearing and then being deleted (i.e. if the game doesn't work and you can't upload it, then an admin would delete it for you and let you try again, for instance).

OTOH ... I'm wondering now if there is a bug with something to do with having spaces in filenames, because most people try first with spaces, and second time without. There *used* to be a bug on the server where it didn't handle them properly, which was fixed a while ago, but maybe it's still (somewhere) sending them to the browser unconverted and causing the browser to get confused instead.

If at all possible i would like to be able to delete the old game.

That's no problem, I will do it today. It only takes a few seconds .

[blahblahblahh]

Just spent an hour discovering that bloody MySQL bloody JDBC driver doesn't always throw an exception when an INSERT fails.

Unit tests? They've heard of them. They don't really know what they are, though.

Grumble.

[TheAnalogKid]

blah3,

I've uploaded the necessary jars for Windows version of the game only. 2 problems:

1.  I can't set any system property, which might cause bad performance on some systems. Especially for translucent images.

2.  No way to set the main class of the game. You assume that the jar contains a manifest file describing the main class. I'm used to specify the main class in the jnlp file.

Could you delete the Mighty Bubbles Demo entry please? I also need to update the descrition of the game since it contains crap data at the end.

Thanks

Adam,

I've added the attribute Main-Class to the Manifest.mf in the game jar but it still have the same problem:

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An error occurred while launching/running the application. Title: Mighty Bubbles Vendor: Author: theanalogkid Category: Launch File Error No main class specified for application

[TheAnalogKid]

and here is the JNLPException:

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35

JNLPException[category: Launch File Error : Exception: null : LaunchDesc: <jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/" href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha.jnlp">   <information>     <title>Mighty Bubbles</title>     <vendor>Author: theanalogkid</vendor>     <homepage href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/views/view-game?Mighty+Bubbles"/>     <description kind="one-line">description test</description>     <icon href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/game-logo.jpg" kind="default"/>     <offline-allowed/>   </information>   <security>     <all-permissions/>   </security>   <resources>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/dom4j.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/gagetimer1_1.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/jinput.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/jutils.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/mighty_bubbles-demo.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-dxinput.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-dxinput-native.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-fmod-native.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-gagetimer1_1-native.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-lwjgl_fmod3-native.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <jar href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha/win32-lwjgl-native.jar" download="eager" main="false"/>     <j2se href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se" version="1.4.2+"/>   </resources>   <application-desc/> </jnlp> ]       at com.sun.javaws.LaunchDownload.getMainClassName(Unknown Source)       at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.continueLaunch(Unknown Source)       at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleApplicationDesc(Unknown Source)       at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleLaunchFile(Unknown Source)       at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)       at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

I assure you that my jar is built correctly because I tested it without specify the main class in my .jnlp and it worked.

I use Firefox 1.0. and it does the same thing with IE 6.0

Any idea?

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

[blahblahblahh]

Webstart was designed in about 5 minutes on the back of a napkin by people not smart enough to do such things without making huge stupid mistakes.

You've just hit one of them: webstart IGNORES all jars except the "first one in the XML file" when looking for manifests.

Bear with me whilst I workaround this. It's damned stupid though.

[kevglass]

The first jar in the JNLP is only a fall back, its more correct to specify the main class directly in the JNLP using a application-desc tag.

Kev

[blahblahblahh]

The first jar in the JNLP is only a fall back

Indeed. But ... given that most people already have jars that work before moving to webstart, it's weak. It doesn't pay attention to how people actually develop. Ditto the fact that they renamed, arbitrarily, "ms" to "initial-heap-size"; they now have unrelated parallel naming schemes for literal equivalent functionality. Sigh.

Anyway, it was always going to be a simple fix, but I needed to refactor the whole version-editing process to make it simple (otherwise it would be really nasty, which is partly why it didn't get in first time round). I've got a big chunk of code 90% refacotred which I'm still working on, and once that's done I can add this option easily.

[blahblahblahh]

I've just done a major upgrade of the server, and despite lots of testing (lookin in the other thread, in Game News, on JGF status, for details) there may be some new bugs and problems.

In particular, I've made the "upload files" much prettier, more robust (doesn't use ANY javascript any more) and somewhat easier to use - however, it is DIFFERENT from the old way. Now, instead of making all your changes in one go and hitting "make version", you make each change separately, press the appropriate buttons to make them saved in a temporary space on the server, and when you've finished, you hit "publish".

In the process, I also fixed several bugs which meant if you had identical filenames as other games that you could accidnetally delete files from other games, or get their files appearing in your game (although you couldn't download them,you could only see the file info) . Won't happen any more.

I've added JVM args and properties; both seem to work. Let me know if I've missed any that should be there, I couldn't find my list of all args that work in webstart .

I have NOT added the main-class selector yet. I'll do that later tonight.

[blahblahblahh]

blah3,

I've uploaded the necessary jars for Windows version of the game only. 2 problems:

1.  I can't set any system property, which might cause bad performance on some systems. Especially for translucent images.

You can now, but I've only included a few of them; I can't find the list of what ones JWS supports (in Sun's infinite wisdom, only a few are allowed - and they aren;t all documented). If you have any you need + know work in webstart, let me know and I'll add them in as options.

2.  No way to set the main class of the game.

There is now, on the EDIT RELEASE screen (with the new scheme, you have to create a new release in order to edit it; once you're done editing, click the PUBLISH button at the top of the screen)

[moogie]

another bug report... sorry

I have uploaded my new version of the Jars used in my game as the new uploading screen nolonger listed  the Jars being present saying "No files in current release! (or you do not have access to view the current release)"

It seems the files were already there as now the webstart loader loads twice the amount of data when loading the Jars.

I wend back to the alpha versioning screen to delete the newly added Jars  however it still shows that there is no Jars associated with the game... and all the settings (such as custom JVM arguments) are reset to default.

[moogie]

and now there is another error:

Referer URL:/controllers/release-game

Throwable:java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot create a new version, there is at least one already in progress (version = 12)

Line Source File
122 In GameReleaseController.java
141 ...called from CMSControllersService.java
117 ...called from bExpeditionGeos.java
38 ...called from Geos.java
62 ...called from HttpPostControllerService.java
251 ...called from bAsynchronousService.java
334 ...called from bModule.java
534 ...called from Thread.java



It looks like something went wrong the first time and now that "session" did not close and so i cannot create a new "session" to create a new version...

[moogie]

umm... now it is working...

However i did notice that one of my JARs corrupted on upload...

At least i now saw the corrupt JAR so i tried to delete it and i recieved the following error:

Referer URL:/views/edit-gamerelease?gamename=Anaconda_Net&releasetype=alpha&version=12

Throwable:java.lang.Exception: Velocity is buggy as an ant farm and whoever wrote the exception code broke itso that you can't actually inspect exceptions;

Please note: This idiot put the ONLY critical information in the logfile, so the admins will have to manually search through potentially hundreds of megabytes to find the damn bloody message. Oh how we wish they didnt do that, because we COULDhave AVOIDED this error message and done some clever stuff and shown you a webpage, except that the velocity coder who never tested their code made that impossible. Sob.

Probably useless message from velocity = Invocation of method 'executeView' in class com.grexengine.cms.core.CMSViewService threw exception class org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException : Invocation of method 'fixVelocityCrapBugs' in class com.grexengine.cms.core.CMSViewService threw exception class java.lang.NullPointerException : null

Line Source File
176 In HttpViewService.java
251 ...called from bAsynchronousService.java
245 ...called from HttpViewService.java
334 ...called from bModule.java
534 ...called from Thread.java

[moogie]

And now adding new JARs is broken:

Referer URL:/views/edit-gamerelease?gamename=Anaconda_Net&releasetype=alpha&version=12

Throwable:java.lang.Exception: Velocity is buggy as an ant farm and whoever wrote the exception code broke itso that you can't actually inspect exceptions;

Please note: This idiot put the ONLY critical information in the logfile, so the admins will have to manually search through potentially hundreds of megabytes to find the damn bloody message. Oh how we wish they didnt do that, because we COULDhave AVOIDED this error message and done some clever stuff and shown you a webpage, except that the velocity coder who never tested their code made that impossible. Sob.

Probably useless message from velocity = Invocation of method 'executeView' in class com.grexengine.cms.core.CMSViewService threw exception class org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException : Invocation of method 'fixVelocityCrapBugs' in class com.grexengine.cms.core.CMSViewService threw exception class java.lang.NullPointerException : null

Line Source File
176 In HttpViewService.java
251 ...called from bAsynchronousService.java
245 ...called from HttpViewService.java
334 ...called from bModule.java
534 ...called from Thread.java

[TheAnalogKid]

Can I fill my bug report too? I have the same problems as moogie reported concerning the currents jar completly disapeared and whenever I upload a completly new version (because I don't have any other choice) there are multiple versioning problems. The webstart file incorporates mutliple versions at once:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <jnlp  spec="1.0+"  codebase="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Mighty+Bubbles"  href="http://www.javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Mighty+Bubbles/alpha.jnlp"  >       <!-- Last-Modified header will be set to: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 04:54:23 +0200 -->       <information>             <title>Mighty Bubbles</title>             <vendor>Author: theanalogkid</vendor>             <homepage href="http://games.datadino.com/mightybubbles/mighty_bubbles.jnlp" />             <description kind="one-line" >Capture the water people by throwing them bubbles!</description>             <description kind="short" ><p> Mighty Bubbles is the story of a little girl who wants to save her world of the water ennemies invasion. Their goal is to take control of any source of water. There are multiple water trees. Each of them produces water drops and the ennemies want to consume all of them. You, as the little girl (or boy if you insist) have to capture all the water ennemies by throwing them bubbles. When an ennemy is captured, you must pop the bubble to eliminate him.</p> <p>Your second objective is to retreive all the water drops taken by the ennemies and bring them back to the water trees. A water tree can't hold more than 6 drops so when one is full, you must fill up another one.</p></description>             <icon href="game-logo.jpg" />             <offline-allowed/>             <jgf-release-type>alpha</jgf-release-type>             <jgf-release-version>13</jgf-release-version>       </information>       <security>             <all-permissions/>       </security>       <resources>             <jar href="alpha/12/mighty_bubbles-demo.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/dom4j.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/gagetimer1_1.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/jinput.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/jutils.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/lwjgl.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/lwjgl_fmod3.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/12/lwjgl_util.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/mighty_bubbles-demo.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/dom4j.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/gagetimer1_1.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/jinput.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/jutils.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/lwjgl.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/lwjgl_fmod3.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/13/lwjgl_util.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/dom4j.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/gagetimer1_1.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/jinput.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/jutils.jar" />             <jar href="alpha/mighty_bubbles-demo.jar" />       </resources>       <resources os="Windows">             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-dxinput.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-dxinput-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-fmod-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-gagetimer1_1-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-lwjgl_fmod3-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/win32-lwjgl-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-dxinput.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-dxinput-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-fmod-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-gagetimer1_1-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-lwjgl_fmod3-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/12/win32-lwjgl-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-dxinput.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-dxinput-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-fmod-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-gagetimer1_1-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-lwjgl_fmod3-native.jar" />             <nativelib href="alpha/13/win32-lwjgl-native.jar" />       </resources>       <resources>             <j2se href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se" version="1.4.2+" />       </resources> <application-desc> </application-desc> </jnlp>

[blahblahblahh]

Thanks, guys .

The multiple-versioning is ... weird ... but I'm guessing it's one errant piece of SQL somewhere that is missing an "AND version= XXX" flag on it.

The loss of settings + files when creating a new version was *ahem* deliberate, sort-of: I was going to add another button "create new version using existing version" that would copy everything, but ran out of time - and then forgot I'd planned to do it

Leave it for now and I'll try to have another look + apply patches tonight.

[blahblahblahh]

Yeah, it went down this morning ("too many open files")

LOL, found the bug and fixed it.

I'd modified the GE code for what happens on a 404 to try and do some custom extra reporting - and introduced outside the finally that referred to an open file which was left hanging if the code crashed, which it was doing every time on a certain non-existent file (or, maybe, that file has no access permissions for the webserver).

Migrated it into the finally and all should be well now. No more too many open files issues (we had alomst 1000 instances of that one file still open).

Although, IMHO, the jvm *ought* to implicitly close file handles when it GC's the things that own the handle. I have never understood why it doesn't, other than being a bug they've not yet fixed and have had for years in different places.

[moogie]

have you made any progress with the multiple versioning bug and allowing us to remove old versions?

[blahblahblahh]

have you made any progress with the multiple versioning bug

The broken SQL query was ... merely the one in the JNLP-maker that fetches files - it hadn't been upgraded to select "only this version". Oops.

and allowing us to remove old versions?

Old versions will for the time being all be kept, but not visible unless people try hard to get to them. At some point in the future, someone might add a way to access all the old versions (e.g. if an author loses their copy!) or to delete old versions (author doesn't care and we start to run out of disk space?) but with tens of gb free it's certainly not an issue at the moment!

More pressingly, you want to be able to "copy" the settings and files from the current version into the new one (I feel for those on dialup still). But that's going to take some time, which I don't have until the weekend now probably .

[TheAnalogKid]

blah3,
I've created version 15 for my game but now the game fails silently. No log in the webstart log. Can see something on your side?

[moogie]

Same is occuring for me with my new and improved High_quality version of my AnacondaNet game.

[markush]

Hi!

The generated .jnlp for my game is missing this:

1   2   3

<security>  <all-permissions/> </security>

But i'm using lwjgl so I need it for the native libs to be loaded.

You can test it here:
http://www.javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Arindal/alpha.jnlp?overrideversion=1

Markus

[markush]

Hi!

The generated .jnlp for my game is missing this:

1   2   3

<security>  <all-permissions/> </security>

But i'm using lwjgl so I need it for the native libs to be loaded.

You can test it here:
http://www.javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Arindal/alpha.jnlp?overrideversion=1

Markus

Nevermind... I was just blind...

Works now

[Hansdampf]

are there problems with blanks in names again?

http://javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Quest+for+peace/alpha.jnlp

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

Please contact the admin / dev-team Copy and paste everything below this line when contacting them Referer URL:/jnlp/Quest+for+peace/alpha.jnlp Throwable:java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The specified version has no JVM selected - please go back and choose one! - I found 0 JVM's that matched game = Quest for peace, release = alpha and version = 7 Line      Source File 249      In JNLPService.java 251      ...called from bAsynchronousService.java 334      ...called from bModule.java 534      ...called from Thread.java

and... I'd like to have it Quest for Peace.
Can you change that or should I make a new entry(then just delete the old one) ?

[blahblahblahh]

I know that it says its an error, but - did you READ what you just copied and pasted?

are there problems with blanks in names again?

http://javagamesfactory.org/jnlp/Quest+for+peace/alpha.jnlp

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

Please contact the admin / dev-team Copy and paste everything below this line when contacting them Referer URL:/jnlp/Quest+for+peace/alpha.jnlp Throwable:java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The specified version has no JVM selected - please go back and choose one! - I found 0 JVM's that matched game = Quest for peace, release = alpha and version = 7 Line      Source File 249      In JNLPService.java 251      ...called from bAsynchronousService.java 334      ...called from bModule.java 534      ...called from Thread.java

and... I'd like to have it Quest for Peace.
Can you change that or should I make a new entry(then just delete the old one) ?

Nothing is wrong, nothing is broken, it's just that old games need to have a JVM explicitly selected, once and once only. I didn't have time to make a custom page purely to say "you need to select a JVM" .