Game play issue..

It could be your graphics card that is locking up WebStart… I found that DirectX is sometimes very flakey and many Java apps would lockup my machine (because of Swing’s use of DirectX) until I replaced the graphics drivers.

Yeah, I’ve definitely had that, but repeated attempts still don’t work for me IIRC. Other times, it just acts as if it isn’t even installed - no file association/mime-type/etc, nothing. java webstart pages just make MSIE go “Duh?”. Actually, I may not even have tried it on linux. Although, given how much harder it is to set stuff like this up on linux (no standard web-browser, for instance) I may never even have managed to get it to start, let alone work :(.

I’ve had similar problems all the way back since 1.3, and when it was an optional package. The way I see it, if they still can’t make the damn thing work on a large percentage of clients, I’m not even going to think about using it as a developer for at least a few years. What’s the point in a deployment technology to make life easier for the user when it silently crashes, hangs, and doesn’t work? (From a sun-provided install package!)

EDIT: Lol, so much for posting a reply in the wrong place :slight_smile:

I had the same problem regarding Webstart on my Win2K machine at work when I upgraded to JDK 1.4.2. Webstart , which did run just fine in with the 1.4.1 beta wouldn’t work anymore.
Only uninstalling of all JREs/JDKs and reinstalling of JDK 1.4.2 helped. Must have been a registry related problem. This behavior was reproducable on other Win2K machines which had a JRE with Webstart installed before.

But this is the only problem I ever had with Java Webstart.
With my other machines (Linux and Win) it just works. So to say it is completly buggered might be a bit of exaggeration. :wink:

About installing it in Linux, you just need one line in your ~/.mailcap (or systemwide /etc/mailcap) file and all browsers and mail clients know JWS:

application/x-java-jnlp-file;/opt/j2sdk1.4,2/jre/javaws/javaws %s

The webstart install script adds this line for you, along with the entry in ~/.mime.types

Thanks for all that. I’ve had 5 versions of Mozilla, two of netscape (against my will - distro installed them :frowning: ), and done two restores from backups on this PC - so it’s quite possible I broke something subtle.

I’m especially thankful that you told me about Mailcap - OpenOffice 1.0.1 has 0wn3d that file (filled it with 50 lines of associations), despite the fact that I’d installed 1.0.3 (which apparently was too shy and retiring to want to take control)…in typical linux fashion, it’s a stupid filename (I don’t have mail-related apps on this computer, so what do I want with a file called mailcap?) - although I can guess historical reasons why a mime-type assoc file would be called that - and there’s no manpage for it.

[quote]Right, I’ve added a bunch of zip files for the current version. I’m afraid they might not get updated as quick as the web start version, but I can but try :slight_smile:

They’re all under the downloads section, hopefully they’ll work. Give um a try and let me know…
[/quote]
Seems to be the standard problem that using external libraries with the JRE is either incorrectly documented (by Sun), broken (in some platforms), or undefined (and so basically no-one has a clue)…

It would give me more confidence (as a developer) in things like LWJGL if this kind of thing didn’t happen everytime to most people on linux (I can sort it out, thanks to Elias, but none of my users would be able to). My vague memories of LWJGL are that I need to add a -X directive or similiar, to force the classloader to recognize the .so file in the directory, but I’ve no idea what any more :(.

All I do remember is that the JRE/JDK violates “principle of least surprise” here: you can’t just put libjogl.so in the classpath; that has no effect.

java -jar prime.jar
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: net/java/games/jogl/GLEventListener
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:537)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:274)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:302)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:537)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:274)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:302

If it was a library linking problem I’d go for:


java -Djava.library.path=. -jar prime.jar 

or 

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH;.

But it looks to me like it can’t actually find the jogl.jar, which probably means I’ve got my manifest wrong, maybe I got the / the wrong way round or something. This might work better:


java -cp prime.jar:lib/newdawnnet.jar:lib/jogl.jar -Djava.library.path=. org.newdawn.astro.client.Game

I’ll check it out and try have it fixed as soon as. Knew I shouldn’t have rushed those distros :wink:

Kev

Yep, looks like I got my slashes the wrong way round, god I’m becoming such a windows freak…

Kev

[quote] This might work better:


java -cp prime.jar:lib/newdawnnet.jar:lib/jogl.jar -Djava.library.path=. org.newdawn.astro.client.Game

[/quote]
Yeah, that did the trick. Thanks.

Back on your original subject, have you thought about having dots around the edge of the screen that indicate the position of offscreen enemies? The dots could change colour as the enemy grows closer and then fade away just before they appear on screen again…

(with apologies to anyone who might’ve suggested this before, if I missed it in the prior postings)

Its a top idea (Cas did mention something earlier about arrows around the edge), colouring would be a nice touch tho…

TBH, at the moment I’ve having network troubles, so funky feature updates are on hold :slight_smile:

Kev

Astroprime has hit version 0.15a :wink: Had to tell someone. Its got multiplayer, collisions, shooting and asteroids. I’ve also made the play area loop round to prevent not being able to find people. In addition, I’ve reduced the max speed that you can thrust up to. However, you can still get going faster by ramming into asteroids (storing up momentum) and then bouncing off them later on :slight_smile:

Most of the features listed in the thread have been added to the agenda and will be going in. Thanks again for all the help.

I’m carrying on, even though I’m not quite sure whats going to make this game fun.

I’m also having some annoying bugs cropping up that can’t be reproduced easily which is leading me to believe that my code integrity isn’t that great. So I’ll be spending quite a while documenting the code and understanding whats going on before a large phase of refactoring…

http://www.cokeandcode.com/astroprime

Thanks again folks…

Kev

It doesn’t run for me any more. =( I just get a white screen. Fullscreen.

This is getting annoying, I’ve been trying to fix an issue with starting in full screen (well generally actually) that causes all the textures to come out pure red.

I’ve updated the version back to the old method of doing init. Should work ok now…

Kev

Yah know, for the Java Web Start problem, I just used j2re 1.4.1_04. The j2sdk1.4.2 with NetBeans didn’t setup my j2re so I had to download a separate version. Fullscreen works fine for me. Actually everthing works fine. :wink:

Considering skipping the battle/combat only game and going stragiht for the MMO. I have a feeling this would be far more interesting to players…

Any thoughts appeciated…

Kev

Why don’t you start a thread in Your Games Here for announcements? I missed this one because of the obscure thread name. :wink:

It seems to work better now, but that desktop integration popup seems to kill it. I had to taskswitch to click it, then switch back to the game.

I still get red rectangles only.
S3 savage ddr 8mb ram

I’m going to write a test case for this red rectangle thing. It seems to be that the wrong mode is being selected by the GLCapabilities chooser, but when I tried to fix this, it screwed up a bunch of other stuff.

As and when I’ve got this test case ready, could you test it for me Krypto?

Kev

PS. I’ll open a topic on Your Games Here pretty soon, just want to make one more update b4 then.

sure ;D