as I’ve remarked several times before, java3d is horrible for something you want people to actually play. It’s pile of user-unfriendly buggy non-backwards-compatible untested incompatible yuckiness.
Although, normally, I’m much gentler than that. And, as Herk says, with webstart you should be OK - just so long as the author is VERY careful to choose a specific version of j3d that actually works with his particular game.
I cannot agree … since Java3D is distributed with WebStart, most people told me that they did not have any problems at all.
Currently it should be a no-pain-single-click to start FG (or any other Java3D app that uses the WebStart extension).
For Java3D is quite conservative (to put it the positive way) concerning latest graphics hardware features, normally there are no problems.
And even without, there are not too many Java3D versions that have ever been released? 1.3.1 is the version to use since years or so.
Honestly, I never felt insecure while building on top of Java3D. Au contraire.
Well, worked with a single mouse-click for me - having Java 1.4.2, no Java3D pre-installed, Windows XP. Granted, this is probably one of the ‘standard setups’, but it worked immediately.
I said that without webstart it’s a nightmare, and it is, and you cannot deny that. You know the problems of successive versions: e.g. the last version I saw COMPLETELY broke the sound. The version before regularly crashes linux unrecoverably on some games (although the latest version doesn’t, IIRC - but the version before didn’t either). Shrug. J3d has never stopped being an alpha API, IMHO, in all the years (6? I think?) since I first tried using it.
I agree that it ought to be OK for players with webstart - but you are stuck with “write once, debug everywhere”, which is NOT true with normal java nor with most libraries. This wastes a lot of developer time :(.