Excelsior JET for 10 bucks ? AND its charity ? I’m in.
Normally its like TWO THOUSAND dollars.
So obviously I got the double pack.
[quote]For your $10, you get a single-user perpetual Excelsior JET, Standard Edition license for the platform of your choice (Windows or Linux), commercial use permitted. The delivery is electronic.
Support is not included
[/quote]
Let me just add that JET really is good.
Cas 
I dont really get the differences in versions, not that I could afford another one. But with this I can sell games, so… what more could you want but maybe support ? =D
Also do you actively use JET at the moment ? I know you have some experience with it, but are your latest games all native compiled, and if not why ?
Historical reasons.
When I first started out Java games development I got the full JET with JetPerfect and everything. I got the entire Alien Flux game demo down to just a 5mb download using JetPerfect. Not only was it significantly faster than the Sun 1.4.2 Server VM at the time (I had to resort to using fixed point arithmetic in Alien Flux to get it to run at 60FPS on a 450MHz rig), it started in the blink of an eye like a “proper” C++ application. Back in the day, the 6-7mb saving over shipping an embedded JRE was significant enough to have a fairly large effect on the number of successfully completed downloads (because much of the world was still using 56k modems in 2003, believe it or not)
Anyway: I spent a lot of money on JET tools thinking Alien Flux would make it back in a few weeks on sale.
It turns out indie game development is a bitter, harsh path, littered with the corpses of failed developers. Alien Flux never even made a profit let alone paid for all the things I bought to make it and release it. I was broke from that point onwards having blown what amounted to my life’s savings on developing the game so I scaled back my ambitions and tried to keep life simple for myself, so I got a job and did game development in my spare time, of which there was very little. Jet does add an extra layer of complexity to deployment; after you’re satisfied it works in a JRE build, you need to do a JET build. At the time, also, JET was only available for Windows, and I needed to deploy on Mac and Linux which both used JREs. So I made the fairly straightforward decision to save myself time, and money, and complexity, and stop using JET.
In the meantime the landscape changed. DSL became suddenly commonplace by about 2005. Indie gaming took off a short while later. Computers just got incredibly powerful. I still didn’t have any money or time, until 2010.
Cas
How much faster than the server VM is it today? It might be worth those 10 bucks… =S I mean, charity AND more particles!
The $10 version doesn’t include the JetPerfect part I don’t think. If that bit exists any more, not really sure.
(JetPerfect produces an entirely, completely, standalone .exe with only the actual code you use. Normally JET is deployed as a bunch of pretty large .dlls which comprise the JVM, and your .exe with all the compiled code in it that you point it at, regardless of whether it’s used or not)
Cas
May I ask how this can help me in the context of indie game development? I understand from reading Cas’ posts, that it might be deployment? Can anyone fill me in on the details?
It’ll help you in the sense that it’s got much, much faster startup, potentially involves less dependency, and for what it’s worth, it completely obfuscates your code so that trivial Java hackeroos can’t monkey with it (though IMHO that’s genuinely worthless for the likes of us).
Cas
Awesome. Not tricks?
How much tom follery is needed to deploy with this then, and what does it even spit out? An executable jar? .exe?
EDIT: Never mind me. I found the FAQ on the site, and it seems to be geared towards the like of me. It spits out an exe. Awesome.
Well, I did say it was good Think I might have a quick go on it myself.
Cas
hmm this sounds good, thanks for the information ! I’ll get the windows+linux pack as well 
… too bad there is no mac support
I just built Revenge of the Titans using the $10 Windows tool.
Result: Revenge of the Titans works Approximate size on disk is actually pretty much identical to the version I currently ship with the embedded Java 7 server JRE in it. Am now extremely tempted to look at Pro license to get the JetPerfect part and optimise it. Hmmm.
Cas
It’s working! 
Is compared to your custom stripped JRE or just the vanilla Java 7 server JRE?
Any performance numbers?
Just bought the $20 win/linux. Don’t know if I need it, but I like Excelsior. I bought and used xFunction years ago, before JNA. It was good software and Excelsior gave great support. I signed an NDA and they gave me their source, which helped a lot integrating into my app.
No perceptible difference in performance, particularly. It runs at 60fps, what more can I say Size comparison is of the installed directory disk space usage.
Cas
Hmm, should a (for now) hobby programmer buy this? I guess I wont need it in the near future but 10 instead of 1k$ seems like quite the deal.
Yes, you should, if only to experiment. It’s for charity!
Cas
I tried it on daedalus
After resolving some tricky issues, I managed to have daedalus running and fully functionnal.
Concerning the size, it’s pretty interesting : the exe is only 9 Mb in my case, add to this 1 Mb of natives + 20Mb of resources, the result is 30 Mb for the whole game … compared to 28 Mb for the executable jar ( meaning without the jvm … ).
For the performance, I ran daedalus without vsync and without FPS limit. I ran a particular case where I know that I’m CPU limited and got better results with the JVM (1.6) … this has to be taken carrefully as I’m testing ingame so the context might be a bit different between two runs …
My test was to have 16 bots playing in a very small map … generating a lot of blood I was looking at the time taken to compute a frame with about 2500 alive blood particles. With the JVM it was 9/10 ms and with the exe it was more 12ms.
So I’m a bit disapointed here
Then concerning the time to run the application, it is a bit faster with the exe but not much: about 500ms on a total load time of 5 seconds … so not much
So at the end, the only gain here for me is the reduced size on disk, and the obfuscated code. The size is not really important for my game, as it should be quite big at the end, so the embedded JVM will not represent 90% of the size
I don’t know if I’ll be using it for daedalus, I’m already using launch4j to generate an exe which is working quite well …
But for a small game I think it could be quite cool … particularly for the size of the exe
EDIT :
I fully agree
Also I forgot but it seems that this software can generate an installer as well … making it even more interesting