How come is it that no-one has made a simple online game that takes place in the universe of Harry Potter?
There is so many aspects and possibilities around this, that would make it perfect for an MMORPG. It is not like we dont have the means to make it, when we have one-man-driven projects such as ultimateworld, and the chipped dagger.
There are thousands of fans that would be deing to play a harry potter MMORPS that is not text-based.
Apart from copyrights, why havent anyone tried this yet?
Uh, I dunno. But they are making a Call of Duty: Harry Potter edition.
That reminds me, I must ressurrect my 'Harry Potter vs Shrek" project…
Maybe we should have a copyright compo - who can infringe the most copyrights in one game!
That’d be fun 
copyrights isn’t even a problem if a HP-MMO project is launched as a one-man project.
There WAS one, back in the day, that was being developed. And guess what? 100% Java. In fact, the work that was being done there is what forced the Java2D team to get transparencies in faster than they wanted old memory - it was a timing issue, not transparencies :). I basically got some of the devs at EA and partners to write me an e-mail or two to “justify” the movement up the stack. Ran those to the top of the company and, surprise, the requirement took precedent over any other thing in the dev. queue. Made me some enemies in Sun, but it was done.
Can’t talk about why it never made it out, but I did see the start of the project, some of the gameplay, and it is a damn SHAME it never launched 
hey what a great java gaming related story and nice piece of info on how/why a part of java was developed. Shame companies work in such secrecy and such news never generally comes out 
Sounds like a bunch of douche bags, why would they oppose such a feature?
Java2d and no transparency? This must be the era of java 1.1 then, since 1.2 is when java2d got transparency and so the period you talk about must be around mid-1998, about a year after the first harry potter book came out. EA must have some really good foresight to have seen that harry potter would become so big so early to consider making a harry potter game. Although the first book was pretty good on its own.
Sadly no surprise here, using java2d for a game at that time sounds like a really poor choice. Java2d only started becoming semi-decent for games with the 1.6/6.0 release. It must have turned out as a really horrid product with serious user and performance issues. Also sounds like a bunch of java noobs must have headed the project to consider such a heavy weight library for the game.
Thanks for sharing though, hopefully you’ll have some more nice ones to share in future
Actually, you are correct. It was not about transparency, it was about a timing issue that (somehow) was tied into this. Memory fuzzy, after all, it was 9 years ago. Basically, corp applications had no issues with this, but games did. If Jeff would pop his head in here, we could get clarification.
[quote]Sadly no surprise here, using java2d for a game at that time sounds like a really poor choice. Java2d only started becoming semi-decent for games with the 1.6/6.0 release. It must have turned out as a really horrid product with serious user and performance issues. Also sounds like a bunch of java noobs must have headed the project to consider such a heavy weight library for the game.
Thanks for sharing though, hopefully you’ll have some more nice ones to share in future
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Actually, the decision to cancel had ZERO to do with the tech and they were very pleased with the performance. Big companies + big licenses + big $$$ = headaches
ah, nice
With Sun now dead (or at least eaten by Oracle), can’t you now pretty much spill the beans and tell us EVERYTHING! now ?
Not until my NDAs run out. They you can buy, what will become, my best selling book
Someone should start development of a such game 
Depends what got delayed due to the change in priorities. If you were going through the proper feature request process and waiting patiently for your enhancement to be implemented, you’d be pretty pissed when it got pushed back to the next major release because some big-wig in EA threw a hissy fit.
Except that it was a show stopper for a customer with a huge property, ground to a halt, in danger of it moving off the tech if we couldn’t get it resolved, and it was the J2D team that broke it in the first place. You weren’t there, so you don’t know.
Oh I’m sure it was the right decision, because sometimes you just gotta push something to the top of the priority queue. But I can understand how even when you make the right decision you end up making a bunch of other people pissed off.
You just summed up the extent of most of my career at Sun
[quote]Not until my NDAs run out.
[/quote]
Which will be? ;D
I believe a Harry Potter MMO would be quite popular but I think I’ll stick away from copyrighted content
Not that Nintendo has came down on us, but its always a worry (Now that they shut down a free open source Pokemon MMO).
they shut that down? huh, such a pity
[quote]they shut that down? huh, such a pity
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They shut down PNet. PWO is still going.
oh, I only knew about PWO, didnt know about Pnet