It’ll all work out peachy if Sun come to a deal with Microsoft and get the new mini-VM pre-installed in IE, like Flash is. Everyone at some level is aware of this, so we’re wondering why it hasn’t happened yet. Any theories?
Cas 
I think the problem now is that we reached a sense of stability far too early; so although the technologies were still emerging everyone took them as is and didn’t expect to need to upgrade. You still find plenty of people running Windows 2000 because there is no need for them to upgrade, and there shouldn’t be. So you will have that group of non-upgraders for a long time to come.
Whatever happened about the big push to get the JRE preinstalled on pre built machines? I seem to remember Chris M shouting about how all new Dell PCs were shipping with 1.4 installed by default. But since then I havn’t heard anything else along similar lines.
Compaq and Dell’s seem to come with Java 1.5 preinstalled these days (at least the corporate ones I see do :)).
Kev
You still find plenty of people running Windows 2000 because there is no need for them to upgrade, and there
shouldn’t be.
Well, win2k works better then xp on older machines. So, this is a pretty bad comparison.
I don’t think Microsoft would have any interest; Java is the competition for .NET, some of the MS software alternatives run on Java (fx OpenOffice) and Sun already has an agreement with their biggest competitor Google.
My website stats (google analytics) show that 98.9% have a jre installed. This was measured over 156.031 unique visitors. Unfortunatly I don’t know how accurate this is, as most of the visitors came from another java gaming portal… So for a non targetted audience the % might be much lower.
Yes, and they tend to come with Firefox as the default browser too
lol, good point.
That would be my suspicions too (with regard to the statistics). As for Java coming with Windows, Sun may force Windows to bundle Java with future versions of Windows if they consider providing .NET with it or as an automatic update as it violates competition rules. And where Microsoft has nearly 100% of the consumer market share it invalidates any cross platform competitive effort!
I’ve been making some money off of this game:
http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/
Nothing near DesktopTD, but the revenue of the last two months combined has been 4 digits.
For the curious, of the clients with Java installed, this is what I’m seeing:
Java 1.1 - 1%
Java 1.3 - <1%
Java 1.4 - 9%
Java 1.5 - 58%
Java 1.6 - 32%
Java 1.7 - one or two hits
So where does your revenue come from? Google ads?
EDIT: great game!
Yeah it’s ad-only. No licensing or anything like that.
Wow! Congratulations ;D
I wasn’t aware Google ads could generate that much money!!!
Mmm, sweet game. So slick I thought it was Flash. So it just goes to show that it can be done…
Cas
Nice game! And thanks for sharing your stats.
One question: what kind of marketing and/or promotion have you done to advertise your game?
Nice game. I clicked an ad for you.
ps. I would also like to know what kind of marketing you did too. Thanks.
I submitted it to a few portals. JayIsGames was first - they like to link to new, interesting web games, and other portals watch JayIs for new content. JayIs didn’t feature it, but instead put it on a Friday “Link Dump” (so yeah, the linked got “dumped”).
From there, it got picked up by portals I’ve never even heard of, like 123spill.no. To this day a large portion of my hits come from Norway.
Unfortunately Digg’s “playable web games” category didn’t pick it up. That’s probably the holy grail.
Licensing the game can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it can bring in immediate cash. On the other hand, if you license a web game to somegameportal.com, and a popular site like Digg links to somegameportal.com instead of your site, you’ve probably lost money over time.
[quote]Nice game. I clicked an ad for you.
[/quote]
Well, cool, I’m glad you like the game, but clicking ads because you like the game is a bad idea - Google will shut down my account if it detects “fake” clicks. So please only click an ad if you really are interested in the ad
This line alone proves my point that Java web games tend to look ugly and the image many people (including java developers) think exactly that … 
Well, yea… antialiasing and translucent images are damn slow after all. And rotation is slow and ugly. You can’t do additive blending and all that. With build-in OpenGL support from the beginning it would have been a different thing. Java would have totally wiped the floor with Flash and Director.
Nowadays you can use lwjgl or jogl, but then you get some scary warning message and it doesn’t work on many machines. Eg it doesn’t work on mine and that issue will never be fixed, since ati stopped updating the driver for this card (9100) long ago. (Usual apps work fine tho.)
Sigh. It’s divine punishment for not buying an nvidia card, I guess. 
If you work around those issues a java game can be pretty neat. Eg Milpa runs perfectly smooth on my super lame 500mhz machine. That wouldn’t be impossible with Flash (there aren’t any flash games that run smooth). You also have a lot more processing power at your disposal… or… mh… more calculations you can do within a second. If you do something nice with that, you’ll have some advantage.
Can’t really think of anything that would fit the bill. Except danmaku with rather poor graphics. Or something with physics (and poor graphics). Or pixel art all over the place, that but that would be too expensive/time consuming.
Good to hear Milpa runs well on your 500Mhz machine. I tried it on a test machine that’s 500Mhz and the game ran below 60fps in some cases. So I’m guessing you have a faster bus speed.
What makes it work well on slower machines is dirty rectangles - only drawing what’s changed. I’m pretty sure Flash does this too.
Would anyone be interested if I open-sourced the engine behind Milpa? I wouldn’t mind getting some extra eyeballs on this thing, and people creating 2D web games might find it useful. Fast image rendering (not Java2D), fractional positioning, alpha blending, bilinear scaling/rotation, dirty rectangles, easy animation API. Additive blending is getting integrated into the architecture (it currently works great on a black background). It’s not a game framework - there’s no tilemaps or collision detection. Just 2D rendering and animation.
Hello brackeen, I would certainly be interested in looking at the source code behind Milpa. I used to studied the soruce code from your “Developing game in Java” book, , it helped me a lot to build my first texture mapped 3d enviroment in Java. I learned a hell lot of crazy tricks from it to speed up the rendering. I would be very excited if you can release more source code of your games.