at least in IE for now. I just tried a game that uses this:
[ur]http://www.fileplanet.com/148891/140000/fileinfo/OSA-Kit---Game-Converter[/url]
this is the game:
http://www.geomgame.com/geom_test.htm
it is written in BlitzBasic and gets embedded into the web browser.
Doesn’t seem to work in my browser.
But besides, weren’t applets as good as dead for quite some time already?
Yeah this plugin has a number of bugs right now. I worked like a charm on my system though. I’m not saying anything against java, I just thought it was interesting.
yes, it is certainly interesting
applets should be either killed off or revamped to be made better (taking a direction similar to flash wouldn’t hurt) they are horribly slow, incompatible with different browser and give java a bad name
you just have to look at java.com front page, they are not using a java applet but flash!
It was blocked by windows SP2 in IE, and wasnt recognised in mozilla. >.<.
Applets should definetly have a revamp, much more like flash in presentation.
yeah it did the same thing to me I just IE to go ahead and install it. It is IE only so no surpise it didn’t work in mozilla. Apparently the author of the plugin is working on a version for Firefox.
[quote]applets should be either killed off or revamped to be made better (taking a direction similar to flash wouldn’t hurt) they are horribly slow, incompatible with different browser and give java a bad name
[/quote]
So what are you guys saing… that making games for Applets is a NO-NO!? I have been fiddling with a Game-Core engine in 2D that renders to a JPanel and that is easily wrapped in an applet or an JFrame making it an Application.
Is that not the way to go, if I want to make small java-games? I have not tested the applets under different Os/broswers but it seems to push the load I want it to.
Running on atleast 50fps in a 320*240 screen. with a graphic-load that one could assume from a small game.
What are you guys saying? That I am doing the whole thing wrong?!
No, it’s just that applets have lost the edge over competitors in many ways. The most important being probably how they’re perceived from the user’s point of view and (because?) there’s still no up to date JRE on many systems.
That said, I think most people still prefer applets over JWS.
I like Applets for on page interactive/enhanced content. I like Web Start for apps and games - stuff that isn’t supposed to be part of the page content.
Too bad Sun let flash win… Flash would never have come into existance if Sun marketed the applet thing properly and provided libraries for doing flash-like stuff.
Well, that and the fact that their authoring tool has been in development for over 10 years has a bit to do with Flash’s popularity 
What is interestign though, speaking to a few developers working on casual games, is that they feel that Flash is starting to die off a bit. Interesting.
-Chris
Flash is only good for animation. Games are limited in Flash due to the antialiased vector-based graphics that give all Flash apps a ‘cartoon’ look. Granted it’s libraries are a bit faster (rotating objects in Flash is cake compared to AffineTransform), but the ActionScript language itself is all but broken. It has gone through some enhancements, and ActionScript 2.0 is OO friendly, but code organization is crippled because you often have to insert code into different frames in the timeline. I’ve wasted hours sometimes looking for code that’s in one of the 1000 animation frames x_X!
Some Flash devs argue that you can use bitmaps for the entire game, which is true… but you don’t have superior control of how or when tiles or sprites are drawn - all you can do is move the graphics onto the scene. Not to mention Flash doesn’t have any support for real-time 3D rendering. You can use something like Swift3D which exports a static non-interactive 3D animation into frames of 2D vectors. Flash doesn’t come close to supporting textures, lighting, etc…
This entire post is based on Flash MX 2004, so there may be some new enhancements in Flash 8 that prove me wrong
You can’t compare applets and flash. Flash is just for having nice interactive animations or videos, in an applet, you can do whatever mankind can do on a computer.
Try that in in flash: http://www.idx3d.ch/idx3d/idx3d.html
There are still very important sites using applets, like the most popular german address-finder and route-planer www.map24.de
Neither of those statements is true. You can do a lot more than that in flash, and a lot less than that in an applet.
Seen better, in a web-page, in flash or shockwave.
Here are the pros and cons of Flash:
Pros
[]Good tools geared directly to delivering online graphical content
[]High availability through small download size and distribution deals with OEMs and proper integration with all browsers
[*]Reliable
Cons
[]Slow execution. (2D rendering not too slow though), but unsuitable for any kind of complex crunching.
[]Few reusable parts, if any
[*]Limited capability
And here’s my take on applets:
Pros
[]Excellent tools geared directly to delivering real applications of all kinds
[]Very fast execution speed compared to Flash
[]Supremely secure
[]Many libraries of code available
[*]Capable of doing nearly anything you like, provided you sign the code and the user trusts you (grumble… LWJGL dlls… grumble grumble)
Cons
[]Excellent tools geared directly to delivering real applications of all kinds… except online interactive graphical content.
[]Poor availability through huge download size and failure to agree distribution deals with key OEMs and broken integration with many browsers
[]Unreliable 2D code: glitches, unexpected slowness, can’t rely on consistent speed or behaviour across platforms
Cas
I pretty much agree with princec here, except in my experience, applets execute slower. Start-up times with Flash and Java are miles apart; Flash will boot up in a split second, but the JRE takes a few seconds and sometimes freezes he computer a bit.
As far as rendering speed… applets are only faster depending on the developer, really. The Java2D library is much slower than Flash (like I said before about AffineTransform). Flash devs don’t have to worry about little niptucks (hw accelerated images, etc.) here and there in their code to see a comfortable speed boost.
A little off topic, but when you compare both platforms, there’s one thing about Java and Flash that sets them apart: fullscreen. Flash supports it, but Java supports it better (and faster). Java’s rendering speed in fullscreen can top some C++ apps. Flash hasn’t optimized fullscreen enough to impress me. It doesn’t give you control of the resolution, bit depth, etc…
To conclude my ramble, if there’s one feature in Flash that I would love to see in Java, it’s the superior FPS control. In Flash you can just set the FPS property and the movie will adjust accordingly. Java is a bit more reliable now that we have things like GAGETimer and 1.5’s nanoTime(), but it took a while for that reliabilty to become available 
But I’m going to get off on that. That’s more of comparing platforms than comparing applets. Blah3 is right, you can’t compare a flash applet and a java applet due to their seperate purposes. But you can compare their platforms. Flash already has a standard GUI, it has recently gotten into networking (besides just loading XML files), and other features that don’t fit the common animation. I doubt the Flash platform will ever be as application-friendly as Java, but we’ll have to see.
Really ? Please go to the link, click on the 3d robot, press ‘A’ for antialiasing, zoom in and rotate him with your mouse.
Then please, post me a link with something similar in swf.
Ideaworks (the group that later made Tomb Raider for mobile phones) used to make commercial 3rd-party 3D renderers for macromedia stuff, amongst the many other products they have had in their history. Unless I’m going senile and am completely wrong - I may be thinking of a different company. I never used the API myself, I just saw it in their offices and in other people’s apps.
Really, what I’m saying is that Flash is rather like java, as noted by woogley - it’s a platform. It controls other code. You can’t really slate it in the way you were trying to. Like java, which does not come with a free 3D card but is able to pump instructions to one, flash has been extended many times to add new functionality that lets it control other apps, libs, etc.
I have read that flash devs spend all there time trying to make flash go fast. Also i my limited expereience with flash it can be very slow when using lots of non-vector graphics.
EDIT: this post makes me sound like i h8 flash, which i dont, it is great for many things.
Can you really compare Java to Flash?!
That’s like comparing apples to pears isn’t it. Java is a OOP language, while flash is something of a programmable 2D-animation system. Perhaps you could develop a huge system upon that system to simulate something of a OOP language that we are used of, and even render 3d in some obscure way, rasterizing with Macromedias neat 2D vectorbased system… Really, has that been done? I have tried Swift 3D. A tool that rerendered a 3D image to a 2Drasterisation like flash uses.
The tool was, huge. The result took quite some time to recompute. And the result was … not more than, plain nice.
Are you Really, really sure that there is a 3D engine that does rasterisation like the one on: http://www.idx3d.ch/idx3d/idx3d.html
You can perhaps compare Java to Flash, as of presenting similar content. Interactive Web stuff. But not as OOP platform. There is simply only one contender in that ring, JAVA.
I might be totally wrong. you might say…Flash does have an object oriented mechanism… still make an eventdriven, threaded, subscribing, polymorphed something, with something on top with flash then.