Gosh, it's quiet in here

General Discussions
#1

JGO has seen a pretty large decline over the last couple of years… there are days where nobody posts at all. Although what is posted tends to be relatively high-value.

I am wondering whether this is the result of continuing total failure of Java to break through as a mainstream games development platform (congratulations Oracle on perpetually failing to capitalise on a slice of another multi-billion dollar market - still no Playstation or XBox JVM after all these years), or whether everybody has just buggered off to Unity (very likely), or whether the forum registration process is broken or too onerous to attract new blood at a rate greater than the forum’s natural attrition rate.

FWIW, myself and @theagentd are doing something pretty exciting and interesting… I suppose we’ll post a bit more about it at some point.

Cas :slight_smile:

How long will the site be alive?
#2

Hey, teasing is not fair :smiley: Could you give us some bread crumbs what it is, that you are working on?

I think the problem is, that most people are consuming, not producing. Me included. And as you said nowadays Unity harvests all the low hanging fruits, why should anyone still chose Java for his game, other than small android games? And those are promoted directly in the app store, I think. I post rearely, because the features I implement take so long until I can show them, and most often I am not satisfied with them at all, so maybe I’m too shy :slight_smile:

#3

We’re making a 3D engine for Battledroid, because it looks like we won’t be able to manage to make the game in 2D after all.

All sponsorship gratefully received :slight_smile: I/we will attempt to explain how it works over the months.

Cas :slight_smile:

#4

Means everybody is doing actual work and not procrastinating on internet forums. ;D

#5

Sounds great so far, big fan of the small voxel look, recently there was game called 8 bit armies which looked particularly nice using that style, guessing its the type of look you are aiming for? Although a new 3d engine sounds like a lot of work.

From the screenshot it looks like you’re still using LWJGL2 :), if you are relatively early in the engine process, might be best to move it to LWJGL3 early rather than later, as you implement more LWJGL2 API’s it’ll be more of a pain to make the switch. Minecraft also recently made the switch to LWJGL3 to fix some long standing issues and improve performance.

#6

Actually it striked me (but i’m part of it i’m not a guy who took part a lot, so i can’t blame anyone…).
Certainly partially an effect of “free” game engines (same effect can be noticed on other gaming/programing sites), and perhaps a dulling of the “minecraft motivation” for java specifically…

#7

The Minecraft effect is possibly best summarised thus: ooh look a game is made in Java! I will maek game too. Huh this is difficult hard bullshit. Maybe I’ll get a job in a bar.

@kappa We might switch to LWJGL3 but the engine is only a small bit of what’s already done so far so it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Cas :slight_smile:

#8

Java Web is forbidden by browsers
All Kids on Unity, GameMakers and Unreal
All Pro (Indie) – in own garages aka bunkers in isolation
Clean Java Android - almost no one cares
Minecraft Hype is almost gone…
…So – I don’t see clean future for javagaming in current state (((

Solution?
Maybe make forum for gamedev – not targeted to some game engine or programming language
But, is it be better than Unity specialize forum?
In any case it receive more active users than currently have javagaming

I’ve already suggested in the past- Dark solution
[spoiler]“make Game market for indie games” one more - one less - he will find his own audience[/spoiler]
but its dark side :wink:

#9

Multiple reasons:
Java is no longer cool among the youngsters.
High schools / colleges / universities are moving to python.
Java itself is a piss-poor platform for game development, you need mature engines/frameworks, and those tend to have their own communities, bleeding this site dry.

After posts dwingle, it’s a race to the bottom, it’s a self-reinforcing effect: why post if there is nobody to read it, why read anything if nobody posts. You need a minimum of posts per day to sustain a community and we have long sunk below the threshold.

In other news: I’m way too busy with work, which makes the upgrades few and far between. As it’s now, it’s simply not worth the effort to invest heavily in modernising the forum either… so there’s that :point:

#10

A few years ago I realized that everything I wanted to do with Java I could do with NodeJS and the Web ( browser ) much, much easier. Very rarely have I got projects that require something like Java ( like accessing direct memory through JNI ) – and often then I could replace it with something else.

#11

I’m still lurking here daily, but there’s not many discussions I want to jump in on :slight_smile:

Still wrapping up work on Ashworld (PC version is released now on steam and itch) as I will release the iOS version in December and Android in January…

and working on a new game, but nothing to share or discuss about on this forum :smiley:

also think for me some good Slack channels replaced my daily game-dev-nerding-time source over most forums.

#12

Oh, and forums are so 1990-2010 :emo:

#13

I don’t think that libgdx or LWJGL Tutorials can attract at least minimum amount of new ppl to forum
– not today, too many alternatives

I have extra solution – make mods for popular realized games on Java (sadly we have only few)
Mods very well gathering players and developers together
(Sorry I remember only few company’s (ppl): PuppyGames and OrangePixel)

Yes its hard to implement – and almost not profitable in many cases
And it must be easy to understand and to modify game(maps) for end user,
And its no so easy to implement especially for finished game without moding support

p.s I for mods, but sorry I don’t have mental stability to helping with mods full day(half day) for free,
I can help advices, little code, but not every day

pp.s Forum is better then reddit for mods discussion because it’s filtering kids, that too lazy to register on it :wink:

#14

For what it’s worth I still lurk here pretty much every day. But like others have said, I think the decline is a result of client-side Java not really being a thing anymore. We’ve also seen a decline in Java-specific game jams. Minecraft definitely caused an interest spike, but that has died down as people have realized that their Java voxel engine isn’t going to turn them into billionaires.

#15

I suspect a lot of people read but don’t post, I’m definitely one of those people.

You say java on the client is dying? I don’t think this matters one bit for this site because how you distribute your game is of no concern to the end user, its just something to download and run. Java is still very popular out of gaming and will be for some some time to come.

You say java isn’t sexy any more? You are probably right, there are a glut of language choices now, and languages like python are easy for people to pick up even if its not for good reasons, The amount of languages will thin out at some point but from a gaming perspective whether Java can hang on in there who knows. I think there will always be a small community that do use Java for gaming and I will hopefully be one of those (although starting a family severely eats in to any coding time :))

There are plenty of mature engines, the main ones being jmonkeyengine and libgdx. They have their own communities though so people are not likely to come here for questions on those. There are also communities dedicated to creating games such as tigsource. If you wanted to promote your game I would have to recommend going there, they get a serious amount of posts there.

There are also plenty of other language engines going opensource which is attracting more use there and html5 came along so there is yet another alternative for a place to create your game.

For me there are two extremes of people here, people who are very good at what they do and have been successful and people who are beginning in their game development endeavours. There isn’t much middle ground which is more interesting for me.

One big turn off for me here is the site though (sorry RIven!), its very dated , its broken in key places (like changing your email address) and I can’t read it well on my mobile.

I’d like this site to succeed but it does need investment to make that happen (in peoples time) and it would be good if there were more people allowed to help on the admin of the site to make it a success (such as helping to modernise it (help has been offered in the past))

#16

I respectfully disagree. Users are much more likely to play a game that runs in a browser.

#17

That’s like asking for brain-surgery for a perpetually drunk 90 year old. :slight_smile:

#18

Well, there’s no accounting for masochists! :wink:

#19

I still read every day, it’s great to hear the cool things people are up to. I still think it’s an incredible community.
The few posts that we see are very high quality.
I wish some of the old timers would post what they’ve been up to, like kevglass, orangytang, Nate, blahblahblah, Mario badlogicgames, endolf, Markus, jeffk, chrism, Eli D, Shannon, thijs, markus.borbely, appel, delt0r and others.
I agree that web has made Java less appealing. One of the strengths of Minecraft when it first came out was that it could be played in a browser through applets which is no longer possible. However, tools like GWT and webgl4j help that. I suppose new people considering what language to learn would naturally choose JavaScript.

#20

In the last 18 months, over 100K people have at least looked at the “Getting started with JavaFX Game Programming”. I think it would be great if some folks wrote follow-up tutorials to build on that. Maybe some of those visitors would stick around with more of a “track” to follow.

I can see where there is a lot of frustration here with many of the veterans, with JavaFX. Though for my purposes, simple GUI’s and 2D games and even some simple 3D game ideas, I haven’t run into any of these obstacles personally. Maybe that is more a statement on my limitations than anything else.

What is needed to get, for example @abuse’s suggestion of a WriteableImage.getGraphicsContext()? This is over my head, in terms of understanding what is involved.

What would be possible if we did a better job of supporting JavaFX for what it can do well, and the fun that can be had working with it? We have JavaFX listed as a child tab on Java2D, which doesn’t seem at all right to me. The few posts that are on that thread are mostly complaints about what JavaFX isn’t, not solutions to interesting problems or anything fun. I think that would be very discouraging to anyone interested in exploring learning more about coding in the JavaFX space. It would be more encouraging if there were some articles on next steps after the beginning stuff in that article.

I’m sorry to be taking so long with getting the little audio mixer tool up and available. Seems to me with JavaFX and a decent audio tool (AudioCue is not bad, for starters), there’s a lot of neat stuff that could be made.

I think part of what makes Java cool is that you can code-explore mechanics and ideas and thus make something that is not a template-driven clone of a clone, but has its own unique aspects. Sometimes we get people here who are relatively new to programming and interested in game-engine level coding, and they usually run into a blizzard of discouragement. Exploring engine mechanics could lead to figuring out some new game mechanics to try out, and the skills learned would make it easier to follow through on those ideas.

Java continues to be taught in high schools and colleges. There is a large reservoir of kids that is going untapped, it seems to me.