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Closed 11 years ago.
I'd like to port my Zuma-like game to browsers. It's not really complex 2D arcade game, just some animations and particle systems - really similar in complexity to the one I linked to.
I'm wondering what technology should I use. I'm thinking about Java, Flash or maybe some solution working without a plugin (SVG, Canvas?). The cost of the technology is also really important to me (I'd prefer a free solution of course, but don't know if it's possible).
It's really probable that I'll also port the game to Android and iPhone. Maybe if I picked Java, I could write one version that would work on both: browsers and Android phones?
Sorry for my lack of knowledge, my situation is pretty weird now, since I got an interesting offer from a producer.
If you really want to port game to the web (e.g. it is not a weekend project of yours), it is a real project which is supposed to be used by many users, and you are not paid specifically by Google or Microsoft to make this game using JS+canvas, you should choose flash. Making professional games with HTML5, which works on every browser is very time consuming task. Also I'm not really sure it is possible to make HTML5 game without Flash, as far as I know web versions Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are using flash player for sounds (since there is no low latency sound api in browser).
So this is one of the reasons why to use Flash. Another reason is that Flash is used for creating games for very long time, there are lot of resources, game engines , tutorials, user groups and etc.
Also you don't need to buy anything from Adobe to start building games, there free editors (like FlashDevelop) or more advanced commercial IDEs(f.e. Astella from JetBrains).
HTML5, javascript and CSS3 will make your game run anywhere, its free and its the future.
HTML, CSS, JQuery seems to be the emerging way of creating anything on the web. This includes games. Yes, this technology hasn't been "perfected" yet, but I would at least spend sometime with it. Hey it's free, portable, and is always improving.
I found the following link on Google by "searching HTML5 game engine". http://impactjs.com/
Someone posted an all CSS game on YCombinator a few days ago. It's amazing what you can do nowadays!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3483662
http://jsrun.it/GeckoTang/4rXg/
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm planning on developing a game for the Android market, and while I'm very experienced with Java and desktop gaming, I have almost no experience using Android. I heard about LibGDX which would simply let me distribute my game to Android with almost no additional effort beyond coding the actual game as I would a desktop game.
This seems almost too good to be true, can someone tell me whether there are any shortcomings of using LibGDX that I am unaware of (perhaps its buggy, complicates the process, or anything) before I start my project?
Thanks.
I have found Libgdx to be a great tool that enables rapid development of games for Android. This holds true if only for the simple fact that as opposed to needing to install my APK onto an Android device (or fire up an emulator) every time I want to run or debug my app, I can simply run the app in a window on my development PC.
For someone with limited knowledge of the Android SDK, Libgdx will help get you started. However, in the end you will need to become at least somewhat knowledgeable in the Android SDK in order to develop an app that is stable and of sufficient quality for release on the play store. Some things to keep in mind:
The hardware (e.g., GPU) on Android devices is not nearly as powerful as the hardware on your development machine. Thus, a demanding graphical rendering that runs well on your dev machine might be too much for a typical Android device and bog down to unacceptable FPS. During development you should at least periodically upload your game to an Android device to see how it renders.
There are hundreds of Android devices on the market today, and you will need to find a way to test your game so that you can be sure that your game is compatable with the devices/OS versions you are targeting. (Google suggests that a beta release on the Android market is a good way to accomplish this).
At some point you will likely want to add Android-styled settings and other GUI styles that make you game conform to Android's pre-defined style conventions. (This makes your game look like an Android app and using the GUI APIs and styles Android already provides for you can save you time in the end).
There are significant differences between Android and pure Java in the way you should style your code for performance optimization (e.g., how to iterate over arrays, whether to use getters/setters or access fields directly). http://developer.android.com/training/articles/perf-tips.html will give you an overview on that.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I have followed tutorials where they show you how to make your own animation class and sound class as well as the basics but I was wondering if it would be beneficial if I were to just use an open source java game engine like jMonkey or the Lightweight Java Game Library, instead of coding my own game engine from scratch? What are you thoughts on this?
I was wondering if it would be beneficial
Beneficial to whom? Are you trying to learn, or to make a game with a group of people?
Is your goal to learn how games engines work, or make a game? Both will give you knowledge you wouldn't get otherwise, and neither is the complete story.
Learning how to create your own engine is useful, and learning how other people build game engines is also useful. Using an existing engine will get you one step closer to making a large game.
Neither choice will really hinder you much from making a small 2D game, as long as you're picking a 2D engine. If you try to make a 2D game in a 3D engine, that will take quite a bit more time to learn, as 3D adds another level of complexity.
LWJGL is an excellent platform to use, not because it makes your whole engine for you, but because it provides great interfaces into libraries such as OpenGL and OpenAL.
However, it really depends on what kind of game you're making and with what complexity. Since it seems this is a hobby type project, it's probably good to use a middleware layer, however make sure that you still understand what it's doing.
Note that jMonkey and LWJGL are fairly different, since jMonkey is actually a full game engine for the most part.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I start to migrate an old Swing app to web interface:
Alternatives I want :
Gwt, Vaadin,Smart Gwt, Ext Gwt
The profile of the app is a custom ERP.
Big question is which ?
Why GWT do not have rich components like Vaadin ,SmartGwt and ExtGwt has ?
DO you know any GWT component library ?
Thanks.
Well, I don't think there is a definite answer for this one. I started about 2 years ago with all this web-dev maze and I have theses conclusions:
GWT: This framework is really all about abstracting you from the "real" web development. The framework has evolved a lot since I use it. It has gotten better and they are continually introducing interesting new concepts and options for you to build your app. They leave a hole lot of freedom to the dev. This can be a good thing since it can be nice to choose components you already know. Say you know JQuery, they have GQuery, you know Hibernate you can use it, Spring you can use it. But, to much freedom is kind of daunting for GWT beginners since it's hard to plug all the components to get an enterprise application. Is it that hard? Not really you get used to it's concepts and start liking it. As far as Widget goes, they do not offer as many eye candy stuff as Vaadin, gxt or Smart but I like to stick with the bases.
Smart: I used SmartGWT for enterprise level projets and it does the job. It has many great components that will get you where you want. It is a huge framework though and it gets complex when something doesn't work as you expected. But, you could be happy with it. It gets a bit hard to use layouts sometimes.
GXT: Really nice. They offer a lot of great widgets, yes. They offer good support, yes. You have to pay :( yes. Unless you are an Open source project, you will have to pay fees to use it. The baseline is, I abandoned it until they release the version 3.0. Why? They are syncing with GWT roadmap. They will be using the same event handling and UI binders. I'm waiting for this to ease my dev. time. Sometimes you also want to mix (which might not be the greatest idea) but the event model being different from the GWT one is pretty crappy.
Bottom line, I sticking with GWT for now. They will continue enhancing it and the support community is great! But you won't get a savvy UI which you could get with any of the frameworks.
good luck
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Closed 10 years ago.
I need to create a Java-based platformer game for a high school project (not computer science related), and I want to spend as little time on technical stuff as possible.
I'm already experienced in Java, and I already have most of the gameplay, graphics, etc. All I need to do is code it. I've looked and I'm considering one of two options that do not involving coding a game from scratch:
Copy an existing Java platformer (best option, but I can't find an open source Java platformer)
Use a Java game engine to avoid coding from scratch. I've looked at JGame but I'm not sure if it's the best bet for a platformer.
I am in the exact same boat as you. There just aren't enough (free, opensource) resources around to help start Java game developement. http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/java/J8d_Game_Framework.html
I think this is one of the best tutorials I have seen around. It basically gives you a template for the game.
There's a book called "Killer Game Programming in Java" that has an example of a 2D platform game using the Java 2D Graphics API. I think the source code for the book is available on the author's site here: http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/
It's a decent book, but the code examples are a little messy. It might give you enough to get started though.
Developing Games in Java is a great book, and the first half of it goes in detail about creating a 2D platformer game. Overall I found the book's explanation to be excellent, and the full game is on the CD so you could mod it to fit your needs. [edit: wait a second... it doesn't come with a CD... the source is on the website, see below!]
I don't feel like it's a super fully-developed platformer; it feels more like a demo. But you could use the game as a starting point and add anything else you need. And the code, being a book example project, is well documented and commented. It has a level format too, so if you find it fits all your needs you should be able to just drop in your images and make your own level files, and then load them in-game.
By the way, the rest of the book dives into creating a software 3D engine from scratch using Java 2D. It's really awesome. Just a bit of a bonus after this project is done, eh?
Also a downside, the book is now almost 7 years old. It uses Java 1.4 though, and the book website is still online, so I'd say it's still a viable resource! In fact, it looks like the book website has a demo of the game AND all of the source code, so you might not even need to buy the book. Go check it out!
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Closed 11 years ago.
When I use Java applets, they tend to be slow, don't integrate very well with the browser environment and often require a few click throughs ("No, I don't want to give this unsigned application free reign of my hard disk").
So, I'm curious.
Are these problems insurmountable? Are there Java applets out there which integrate well with the browser experience (in, for example, the way a well-designed Flash application does?) Can you point out any examples of really "nice" Java applets?
I'm asking this because I want to know if I should be taking a more serious look at Java-in-the-browser, or if Flash will remain dominant for the foreseeable future.
Edit: Unintentional flame bait has been removed. Sorry for any offence caused.
The Facebook asynchronous image uploader is a Java applet.
Update: Apparently not developed in house at Facebook. This seems to be the product.
Amendment:
Now that the question has been updated to be a bit more concise, I thought I'd add more to this answer.
This kind of problem, a mass image uploader (in this case), is the kind perfectly solved by a Java applet. Why?
It uses native UI elements, so users are not confused, or have to learn a new interface.
It can save massive amounts of bandwidth and overhead, because image transformations, such as resizing and cropping, can take place on the client side, rather than the server.
Write once, deploy everywhere (almost, sorta).
Visual Thesaurus is the coolest / best applet I know of.
Check out PulpCore. A really awesome Java applet framework:
http://www.interactivepulp.com/
Performance for it seems pretty amazing too if you check it out on bubblemark.com
Some of Ken Perlin's applets are beautiful.
see http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
eg:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/unicycle/
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/simplex_noise/index.html
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/orange/
(...)
Simple floor plan designing with java applet here. Works much faster than dragonfly.autodesk.com or floorplanner.com (both are flash applications).
A few things...
Some game sites, like popcap.com, use Java applets for their games, and they look pretty good and are very usable.
As far as "why is that button cropped?" - that's probably a layout manager issue. See my article on layout managers, in particular:
http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/GUI/AWTLayoutMgr/shortcourse.html#whyNeed
There are many nice looking applets created with Processing (which is basically Java with some fancy graphics libraries included).
Just take a look at this visualization.
(source: zumkuckuck.com)
In high school I used to play a ton of Yahoo Games and I'm pretty sure those are all java applets. It looks like Yahoo have updated their site since I went there last but you can still find all of the old games here.
The MMORPG Runescape uses a Java applet as a client, and works very nicely, although the graphics aren't nearly as good as other games of the type I've seen. Jagex, the publishers, also have a game site called Funorb.
Another game which is in Java (though not an applet) is Puzzle Pirates. It's not exactly beautiful but it's cute and it's very addictive. Also, it's very speedy and smooth (which has been a knock against Java applets).
Java applets are like flash scripts - They can be used for good, but are often used for evil (e.g., annoying banners). IMHO the main reason that they didn't catch on is that they require tended to require too much skill and used AWT/Swing which produces worse UIs than what a designer with little programming skills could achieve with flash.
I would say that yes, they still exist, but more for business goals that don't require pretty UIs. For example, A lot of web-based statistics calculation tools are based on nice applets.
It's certainly possible. Java2D (the standard graphics component in Java) is capable of rendering beautiful stuff. A big problem is that the default Swing Look and Feel is ugly. I believe Java 7 will have a better one, but there are also very beautiful third party ones such as Substance. I've personally developed a small Java applet game which, apart from the jagged text in the intro screen (which is a bitmap, not rendered text) is visually indistinguishable from a Flash game.
My mom is addicted to the casual gaming at pogo.com, and I've gotta say, they've done an amazing job at fun, easy to learn, nontraditional games that look perfect. I'd love to see their code, honestly.