well its definitely cool for small games
my game Black Nebula is ~50mb as a windows installer, packaging a private jre
native its 8MB
Also you completely bypass java at this point, which can have advantages.
And its also fundamentally satisfying somehow to have native code…
ESPECIALLY if the linux version runs reliably.
Not so fast, cowboy, you’ve forgotten to ship the Jet VM in that zip.
Cas 
oh ok so finally it may not be so interesting for the size … I though that everything was integrated in the exe 
Nice offering. I gave it a try on good old but still quite popular Robombs…works fine, so i can finally offer a simple installer for people who prefer that: http://jpct.de/download/robombs-setup.exe
Excelsior JET is nice however the power of modern PC’s, Java VM’s and the faster internet connections make it less useful than it once was. If they added support for producing executables that could run on Android/iOS, now that would be super cool and could give them another nice little niche market to sell to.
I’ve talked to Dmitry about ARM but the long and the short of it is, they’d love to do ARM but firstly they’ve got no actual dedicated skill/resource/money to do it yet, though it’s on their hitlist, and secondly, they have to get a special license as I understand it to deploy to mobile devices. I’ve hassled him at length to produce an ARM headless only “dll” builder that could be bootstrapped by Android or iOS Though actually right now I’d rather like them to get a Mac OS port done instead. But that’s again, a lot of work to support headful stuff, requires a license from Oracle, etc.
Cas
I picked the $20 dollar deal.
While I am using Avian to solve the problems I would have used JET for I just could not pass up the deal just to compare and evaluate possibilities for future products that I will deploy.
Also picked it up, seems like too good of a deal to pass up, even if I don’t use it now, might need it later on.
Dmitry Leskov from Excelsior here.
Just to clear things up a bit:
JetPerfect is long gone, for two reasons - it was not JCK compliant, and its aggressiveness often made it extremely error-prone (the tipping point was an SWT application failing because it was compiled on a machine with a clickwheel-less mouse and JetPerfect had stripped the clickwheel-handling logic off the EXE! )
We have since created a replacement technology that we call Java Runtime Slim-Down, which does not have the above issues. With it, I was recently able to bring the JavaFX 2 Ensemble demo down to a 19MB standalone download (i.e. a single installer that does not need the JRE nor the JavaFX Runtime pre-installed.)
The only caveat in the context of this thread is that Java Runtime Slim-Down is only available in the Pro Edition and up. But:
- If your game is non-commercial, you can get a free Pro license. See e.g. Cultris II.
- Otherwise, we have discounts for small businesses, especially for bootstrapping companies.
If you have further questions, you can reach me at dleskov (at) excelsior-usa.com.
Hi Dmitry! You really should make more of a song-and-dance about these features like free Pro licenses and small biz discounts!
Interesting that you brought up the JetPerfect issue there - I had no end of trouble for exactly those reasons. What got me was frequently small issues with different locales and so on; I released a fair few “dud” Alien Fluxes. It was one of the reasons I eventually gave up back in the day and switched to using an embedded JRE. Slimdown seems like a much more sensible tradeoff in space for complexity and reliability.
But yeah… Mac OS port, pretty please :-* :-* :-*
Cas
Hi Cas,
I thought I was doing good job there - there was a prominent “Get It Free” link on all Excelsior JET pages prior to this charity program, and there is a block of links to the various discounts options right on the order page. Even in the charity program FAQ there are multiple links. What else do you think I could do here?
We expected that Project Jigsaw would make it even more sensible, but that has been pushed to Java 9…
It used to be the #1 feature request, but now Java 7 support seems to be taking over.
Actually I could do with Java 7 too, because I’ve just switched my whole new codebase over to Java 7 and I’m not looking back.
wrt. exposure - just mentioning it on your own site is not enough! You need to get out to places like here to mention it (maybe try a ProjectWonderful ad), get more articles out there on dzone, gamasutra, etc - a constant reminder of the existence of JET and its availability to potential targets.
Cas