I remember when I was young, there has been some noise on a F1 racing game to come written with Java3D…
Is it still there? Somewhere? ???
I’ve been waiting (forever!) for the F1 racer as well. Last I heard Jeff was working out some issues with the installer… That was months ago.
Hey Jeff are we likely to see this soon? Or has some issue come up that is preventing its distribution? ???
Scott
A couple of issues came up that got in the way of my efforts to build an installer.
Hopefully ill be able to get back to that soon.
:o
181 view on the topic! People still seem to be interested in what is coming there…
hey, Shawn, this one's for you.. ;D
If we had a java board, at least, it could at least promote java web facts. About gaming, we (people that can't get to trade shows) are still waiting for it to show gaming facts.
Okay, not a fair one, but we'll soon be able to say we've been waiting for years for these examples... Sorry guys, but if the goal of the site is to promote AVI, that's done. How about showing games? Discussing about microbenchmarks and compiler options is okay, but you should change the name of the site...
I’ve given up waiting for this one, I think I’ll sooner see PS XI before seeing this racer game. :-/
-Chris
Warning: Long Post
First, I would like to say this is just as frustrating to me if not more so than the rest that are interested.
Second, and most important, there is NO F1 racing GAME.
I have kept quiet about this for the most part because it not my property, and I felt not my place to address in a public forum.
There does exist a Java3D Grand Prix tech demo. F1 is a trademark and can not be used to describe the project. The history may clarify the difference and the issues involved, so please allow me to specify my claims.
In the Fall of 2000, the Java3D team contacted my team at Full Sail to create a VERY SPECIFIC tech demo involving a race simulation of F1 racing for SIGGRAPH 2001. At this point my team at Full Sail had developed several other tech demos of our own design and had demonstrated them at SIGGRAPH 2000 in the Sun booth.
Sun was a sponcer for the McLaurin F1 car and the Java3D was looking for a new demo for the next year, one that had simulation AND gaming appeal, in a effort to widen the application base for Java3D. We analyzed the project concept and the created a proposal that our small team could create to match there goals in such short time. A contract was drawn up and work began in January 2001 – giving us a 6 month development cycle.
At about the same time the Grand Prix project was forming, the JGP was starting up and we also got involved with those efforts. For GDC that year, we demonstrated “Jamid” a FPS tech demo that we built in two weeks! It was great fun and we where happy to show off at GDC.
One of the reasons we could develop these things so fast is that we had a existing “game” engine, called “Humid”, at Full Sail which we had developed for teaching game CONTENT production. This is not production code, it has a very long history at Full Sail, and was designed for end users NOT programmers/developers. At one point it was promoted as value in the curriculum at Full Sail.
Now Full Sail is not a public institution. It is not in the habit of developing products, and is not known to give anything away. The group of people that worked on these projects pushed the limits of what was possible in the corporate structure at Full Sail. To Full Sail’s great credit it agreed to let us give certain pieces away and completely supported us for the conference demos which was considerable expense.
Back to the Grand Prix…
The Grand Prix is a PAID project, contracted by the Java3D team at Sun not anything to do with gaming. It requirements were very specific and the delivery was equally so. It is not a playable demo for general distribution, I REPEAT, it is not for general distribution.
Now let me explain in what ways…
The 2D interface and game set up is not user proof.
The game is not time based therefore will not run correctly on any speed CPU.
The game has very specific graphics requirements. (Multi-texture support for minimum of 4 textures per-pass)
Multi player mode will only work on a LAN – this is even specified in the contract.
This is all due to the fact that it is a tech demo, with a ridiculous schedule at a ridiculous price and the machines it was delivered on were OUR machines. This project did exactly what is was suppose to do, no more, no less. The fact that it got sucked into the void that is just Java gaming is just history. It is property of Sun, specifically the Java3D team.
Now, this demo can be made into a generally distributable game demo. But it’s not going to happen unless Sun does it, or they come ask us to do it. Neither have happened for various reasons. In the meantime, Full Sail’s involvement in Java/Java3D has dried up, and “Humid” was been decommissioned, so the core code base is no longer considered by those that developed it of very much interest.
Fast forward to today. It was been 2 years since that demo went public. The Dreamcast has come and gone. Vertex and Pixel shaders are standard graphics features. 64M graphics are the norm with 128 being SOMEWHAT exotic. This demo will do little to promote Java, Java3D, and Java gaming unless it is seriously refitted, or completely remade. In the two years that have passed there has been one minor treatment of the project and that was porting and testing the code on Linux for last years GDC. (which BTW took one day). Otherwise, we are talking about a 2 year old graphics demo in a current graphics world of “dead in 6 months”.
My team has consistently produce new demos year after year and made the efforts to be at the conferences promoting Java, basically as a labor of love for Java and Java3D. In the corporate world where we live, these demos got us to the conferences. No “last mile” clean-up and/or user level distributable is ever made, because there simply is no funding or incentive to do so.
Please feel free to ask any more questions as I have no idea how well I have commutated the issues involves, as well as having left out many details in this projects history.
==========================
On a related note, some of the team members that created the original demo’s have formed a company, and are hard at work developing production level middleware AND downloadable demos that will show a case for Java/Java3D gaming.
Apparently my quotes ( " ) got turned unto
“
”
I’m sure you guys can sort it out 
Sorry one correction -
"Fast forward to today. It was been 2 years since that demo went public. "
That should have been “since the demo was designed, and 1 1/2 since it went public”; there was a alpha demo of it at the Java Users Group of February 2001.
Wel…
I agree with Shawn that its somehwat old tech but i still think it would be nice, if I could get the time, to get a releasable version out. Its not a full professional quality game, Shwan is correct, but as a tech demo I tihn khe does hismelf and his team a bit of a disservice.
It does need some “release engineering” type clean-up, which is what has been holding me back (that and other Sun thinsg that keep getting in the way of doing that.)
Now I think we’re gonna see some demos this year that will make this demo pretty ho-hum, but it still wouldn’t hurt to get it out to the public. The ramp up in machine power out there Shawn mentioned has IMO actually made one issue less of a big deal-- the minimal frame rate for the physics to work right.
How about releasing some of this code into the public, and letting people iron out the details?
Seems that enough work went into the tech demo that it can be enhanced and made into an updated and usable tech demo. Jeff you seem to be busy enough doing important stuff like the JSR and the actual gaming API, why not take advantage of some of us and let us do the boring stuff like finishing an installer and ironing out code?
I’m sure the Sun lawyers wouldn’t be happy about this, but the Sun higher ups should be glad people are willing to promote their stuff for FREE!
This site just badly needs demos and we have a lot of intelligent people around here willing to volunteer. Seems mutually beneficial to me.
200% agreed.
Jeff, everyone will benefit from a release, you (sun) and us. Please, consider this.
Thx Shawn for the clarification! Now I’m enlightened about the question why somebody would take the effort to do a racing game in Java.
I’m disappointed to see that there still is no proof that action 3D games can be done. As Shawn points out, even FullSail wasn’t able to solve basic Java problems like exact timing (this doesn’t mean high-res timing!!).
I still would be interested to see the tech demo. Even if it was under some kind of NDA. I wouldn’t need an installer though. Just to see how far one can get.
Now, who is currently owning the stuff? Sun? FullSail?
I wouldn’t call the demo ‘released to the public’ considering the lack of availability of an online download of the demo. As far as I’m concerned (as maybe other people in the forums) is that the demo was complete smoke and mirrors, and until something can be seen first hand, I have no reason to believe otherwise. Sorry, but that’s the way of things, I’m not going to accept the feasibility of something (such as Java in games programming) just ‘because someone says so’. We’d like to see some real world examples, and I just can’t believe that sun would make such an investment and not show it off to the development public. Jeez, take a page from Microsoft’s playbook: if you have it flaunt it. Seriously, what kinda of message does it send when a company says ‘We put together this kick ass demo demonstrating that you really can make Java games! But, we’re going to keep this baby locked up in our Ivory Tower…ha ha!’. Makes no sense to me…none at all. If IBM did it, you’d have a developer works article about it, and it’d be available for download without question. (I’m not even going to mention the ‘O-S’ words but they probably would have allowed the source to be available as well, like all of their other alphaWorks projects).
Very sad, really…very sad.
-Chris
You are missing some important points I tried to explain.
The Grand Prix demo has NOTHING to do with Java Gaming directly. If you want to convince someone to distribute it, post to the Java3D mailing list.
Jeff and Chris have gone way out of there way to try to get the demo into a position for general distribution from within Sun.
As far as Open Source goes, the engine core was a “customized” version of the “Humid” engine I mentioned before and is owned by Full Sail and is not ever going to be open source. This has nothing to do with Java gaming or Sun either. If you like you can also write Full Sail begging them to release everything we have done using Java/Java3D for the last 5 years, but I doubt it would care very much because you are not paying for anything. It is a company, not a community.
I have to say to some degree the complaining and whing about this is annoying. Is this particular demo the make or break for you in terms of Java gaming capabilities? If it is, you have been sitting by waiting for a long time probably will be much longer.
Besides a demo is a demo is a demo and this was a Java3D demo not a “gaming” demo. No matter what it did, it won’t carry as much meaning as you think. You can check the old forums on these topics we covered it before. The only thing that will convince people is an ACTUAL production game that was also SUCCESSFUL and made people MONEY, end of story. (BTW there are a few…)
BTW, if it is not “released” by March, anyone interested can come to GDC and I will gladly show it to you on my laptop 
Ah well, I guess I should explain my points:
I didn’t mention Open Source (in fact I made a point about NOT mentioning it), rather I was comparing business practices between sun and ibm (the former doing all this work only to keep the fruits of their labors quitely tucked away, and the latter throwing some cool stuff together (xml parsers, logging frameworks, etc) and actually gasp releasing it to developers so that they can learn from it and become gasp better developers! It is this sort of mentality that I think hurts developers seeking leadership from sun.
And showing the ‘demo’ (and I use that term loosely) on your own laptop will still prove to me nothing…you could be runnign a native app, you could be using a special JVM, any number of things. It may not even be using Java3D.
And as far as it having nothing to do with Java gaming? Why was it plastered all over the home page of JavaGaming.org when it was first released, with screenshots comparing it to another released (and, ironically, publicly available download) game?
-Chris
[quote]You are missing some important points I tried to explain.
The Grand Prix demo has NOTHING to do with Java Gaming directly. If you want to convince someone to distribute it, post to the Java3D mailing list.
Jeff and Chris have gone way out of there way to try to get the demo into a position for general distribution from within Sun.
[/quote]
Just to make it very clear, at least my position, I never said Jeff & Chris are just twiddling their thumbs all day and doing nothing. I merely suggested that maybe some of these demos , which you admittedly need a lot of work and are outdated, could be handed off to the public here and we could help Sun in this effort, instead of having Jeff spend time on it when we all know he has a lot on his plate.
I’m not even going to get into this. Full Sail can do whatever it wants with it’s own software, I’m not an Open Source zealot. BTW, I didn’t even say it should be released as open source just suggested that maybe we could help.
I have to say that the “whining” accusation is extremely rude. I merely suggested an idea that I tought was benefitial for everybody here, basically that there are competent people here willing to help for free. Forget the licensing issues for a second, there are people wanting to help for free!!! Is that suggestion so annoying that you have to call it whining? If it is, my God, I want more annoyance in my business. I want people to annoy me wanting to code my stuff for free!!!
I think this grand prix demo was presented as a general Java gaming demo. I believe what you say, but also read up on how it was presented, I see a disconnect here.
http://www.gamespy.com/gdc2002/jgp/
Why present screenshots of the grand prix tech-something and the Jamid stuff if they’re not supposed to be demos of what Java Gaming can do. Can you agree that anybody reading such an article goes away with the impression that this is a demo of java gaming ???
I appreciate you posting the details on this piece of technology, and trying to clarify the issues. But I would be lying if I didn’t say I’m very offended at your general accustations of whining, and overall tone like we’re a bunch of ungrateful little children that don’t even consider that companies must make money and don’t give things away (even abandonware).
The irony I am dealing with here is that the technical issues simply make it HIGHLY unlikely to all but a very few to be able do anything with this demo and it is clear to me that this is very typical in game production.
Let me give one example.
The “Humid” engine uses a proprietary version of the OpenFLT loader Full Sail release several years back. To do anything, and I mean ANYTHING involving “fixing” up the demo will require you have a legal license of Multigen’s Creator 3D modeler and that proprietary version of the loader which is not publicly available. Creator is currently going for around $5,000.00 I thnk.
The Humid engine is based on extensions to the file format and contruction in the tool, which again is very typical of a game development pipieline. Even the HUD is loaded from content created in Creator. In addition, you would have to have documentation on our scripting language developed for Humid to add hooks and controls to models imported. This is not going to happen and that particular part of the Humid engine is one of the things that will never go public.
As for the adoption Java gaming made of the Grand Prix demo, yes JGO has promoted it as an example of what can be done with Java/Java3D which is exactly what it is.
But honestly that doesn’t mean Full Sail is require to give anything to anyone. Sorry but that is the fact of the situation.
I don’t mean to upset anyone with my tone so I apologize. I don’t tend to censor myself in general, and even less so in forums. In any post I make imagine the closing as “Sorry for tactless presentation in advance”
Ok, last post, and I’m out…
Firstly, I’m surprised that there’s nothign that can be done to create a stand-alone demo of this software without lisences. Many many many (I dare say ’ All sucessful’) software companies provide download trials of their software without lisencing restrictions. Go to gamespot.com and download any of the game demos in their section, and you won’t be asked for a single credit card number. I think we are probably on completely different pages here, you seem to think that we are asking to have access to the development tools used to create the game, when all we’re asking is to see the software that lets us drive around a virtual race car around a virtual race track that does absolutely nothing constructive (except for the entertainment value). I mean, who owns the code? I’m getting the sense from re-reading the comments that were posted that Sun doesn’t even own the grand prix demo, it’s actually owned by Full Sail? By both sun and full sail?
I guess I can’t reiterate enough the utter disappointment that sun went through all this effort to produce something that can’t be used to promote java, but I guess we’ll file that one under ‘J’ for ‘Just another crazy management scheme to waste investor capital’.
OAO.
-Chris