Exactly my thoughts!
I mostly lurk nowadays. I left my gamedev job over 1.5 years ago and with the birth of my son, I hardly get around to much any more.
And when I do, I usually work with tech that is work related and try to build a small game out of it.
f.i. a browser game with JBoss & JSP/Servlets, networking code and like.
I am no great friend of (typical) casual games. While I love a game of FrozenBubbles now and again, I would rather play more involved games.
Sadly there seems to be to many clones of clones of trivial games out there. If I see another asian-mmo, I am gonna go nuts.
The most recent game has been DungeonRunners, but since it does not run on Ubuntu, I hardly play it any more.
As was mentioned, Java lost to Flash on the casual web-based market.
Speaking of DR (3d online clone of Diablo), I believe that is what the Java game devs could focus on: mid level games.
DR does not seem overly complicated and not really cutting edge high tech.
Something I am sure a team of JGF people could do as well.
Examples are games like Soulfu that were developed by a small group of people and turned out a great game.
I think there are more then enough ideas floating around that are in need of a dev team to evolve.
Not to mention java could also reach those *nix users that are thirsting for games. Expcially MMOs!
BTW: What ever happend to Darkstar?
For a DR game it would fit very nicely.
BTW: What ever happend to Darkstar?
Alive and well, apparently: www.projectdarkstar.com .
You can even get Sun support contract for it:
http://www.sun.com/service/projectdarkstar/index.jsp
Dmitri
You think so? Hmmmm… Given that there are 3 things occurring right now, I would not hold that position for long. The 3 are:
- Java moving to a unified platform. 1 Java, mobile to PC
- JavaFX. Go check it out…
- Blu-Ray. Any interactivity, graphics, etc that you see beyond the actual video you are watching is Java. With HD-DVD now dead, the only way to do interactive entertainment is in Java on Blu-Ray. Will you see versions of these games moving to the web? If so, do you think developers will re-write them in Flash because, well, because? Not according to the people I talked to at GDC this week.
So, yes, tools for Flash (in Director, specifically) are fantastic. This has not gone unnoticed by the Java organization at Sun.
@trembovetski:
Thanks for the update.
I think it might be a good idea to get some people together and start a project or two.
@ChrisM:
Currently… what the future holds I have no idea.
Still, Flash is ok for casual games and I would not invest much into challenging them on that turf.
But the blu-ray stuff you were talking about in 3. sounds nice from a techie point of view.
- unified platform. comming from a j2me background, I think it will still take a while for mobiles to shift over. Not a question of tech but the mobile vendors are slllooowww.
- thx I will
- I have no clue about blu-ray and like, but it does sound good. I have had contact with a comp out of Hamburg Germany that, from what they have told me, are doing similar but directly from the tv-system (don’t ask me the details).
@JonathanC:
Consumer JRE?
@Topic:
I have no doubt that Sun is working on great stuff, yet I would rather see them focusing on a market they can actually hold instead of trying to waste money in fighting a war they will probably not win.
For gaming I would see that in the mid-range spanning indie devs up to smaller professional teams.
I doubt any company will dare build the next best MMO using java clientside. Not with the people designing, programming and paying it usually still thinking ‘Java, issn’t that horribly slow?’.
One reason why I think a good venture would be for Sun and/or us to take the steps in that direction, building some good small-medium sized games that will prove Java is up to par.
I know at least one large group of Online RPG gamers (that Jeff knows as well 
) with a proven modding track record who would really love to dump time into a game.
They just do not have programmers to build the game.
btw: Issn’t NCSoft working on a game using Java? (I still regret not being able to apply. 
)
Why would people be interested in playing web quality interactive content(games) on their Blue-Ray player?
Has such a use-case been proven to exist, or is this targetting a yet-to-exist market?
PS3 has a blu-ray player… I don’t know how the SDK looks like or what kind of JVM run on BDJ or how fast it is but this may be interesting in future.
(-> java on PS3!)
Like a JVM in a bluray player has access to the CELL or RSX chips
exactly, I don’t know how restrictive the sandbox is (yeah multithreading on CELL would be a dream…). I recently even heard in a interview (can’t find it now) of networking support through BDJ. Perhaps someone with more experience in this area could comment here.
edit:
feel free to join the discussion:
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=37126
cool that’s the interview I’ve searched for 
thanks
Although BDJ will obviously be limited in performance, if it’s good enough to do simple games (like remakes of old classics) it still seems like a very interesting opportunity for us java developers once BluRay will become more mainstream (and the future of BR seems bright).
I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to buy a disc with good versions of the likes of Pacman, Tetris, Asteroids etc for any BluRay player?
As an aside, does anyone know if it possible to deliver BDJ content using DVD discs (or even CD)? I fear it’s probably not, which would be a shame since the BluRay format seems such an overkill (both in cost and in capacity) for typical BDJ based games.
heh yeah that would be a lot of casual games.
Perhaps even all of them ;D
I do wonder if hollywood appreciates how much space 25/50gb realy is…
Sticking a single movie onto a 25gb disc is hideously wasteful, even at 1080p with hours of ‘bonus’ content (aka padding).
Though doing otherwise would obviously be financial suicide for the publishers.
By bloating their content they are also stuffing up any possible growth in the (legitimate) movie digital download market.
Trying to control a game with a TV remote? Blech! 
Most BR players will not be designed for playing games, and so control will be a high-latency, one-button-at-a-time affair. Goodbye asteroids, tetris, pacman et al. Hello, erm, solitaire?
Does anyone know how the input works on BDJ? Is the PS3 controller accessible?
actually if you look around they are shipping quite some games as bonus material I doubt if it would be that bad
Maybe I am being to pessimistic, but I have my doubts that the publishers will put extra content on their films if they are not going to earn anything out of it.
Padding is, in contrast, something they already have and can just dump it into the iso, but they would have to get the games developed extra for the title.
Also they might have to watch out for rights issues as the rights for making a game for a film might already be sold to someone else.
Also, as mentioned, a casual game or twenty on a blueray is slightly wastefull.
What might be a better attack point would be the player & disk vendors.
So f.i., say Sony, shipped a BlueRay containing films and games along with their BR-player.
They will also not try to put to much effort into it as the more games comming out on BlueRays, the potentially less PSX buyers they have.
Then again, that could be interesting for other comps.
If, as bleb said, the latency is high, then that would not be good.
BDJ appears to have very limited scope at the bottom line when it comes to “being interesting” for any of us. It’s a curiosity. Without any kind of performance guarantee it’s next to useless for actual real games like the ones we write.
Cas
I hope BD J is somewhat acceptable at this point for casual games.
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Gaming/Console/J7L7H2R4
If you have some 'killer’casual java games some duffus wil at some point think well what if we accelerate that BD-J and kablam we suddenly have a java game console pretty much everywhere. With respect to targetting platforms it might be cheep to target java and kaboom we are all suddenly writing games in java ;D aaah dreams.