How to distribute Java Runtime Environment with a game.

Business and Project Management Discussions
#1

How and what does Sun Licence say about it?

#2

i think if you have to include a jre with ur game you have to include the full unmodified jre with it, which for games mean no cutting out parts which arent’ needed.

#3

I believe that’s correct. I’ve been looking into using JSmooth and packaging the JRE inside of it. It’s really slick for being able to install on Windows machines.

-Matt Hicks

#4

also gcj is comming along pretty nice of late with the latest classpath, its an alternative if you want to avoid the large overhead of the jre.

#5

That can build native executables for Windows, Linux, and Mac?

-Matt Hicks

#6

yes but downside is you would probably need access to each to system to build on.

#7

There is a software exe4j that make exe for windows. Do not know if there are better exe software out there, but this one seems to work satisfactory.

But the main concern in this topic was that users wont have Java installed sometimes. From what I heard so far in this discussion, Sun does not mind if u include their jre with software, for instance make it install inside the game’s install file?

#8

much better is izpack free java installer, also available as exe not only jar, and this exe can authomaticly download jre from java.sun.com, check it out here:

http://www.izforge.com/

#9

Isn’t it ironical that a software that was supposed to make Java installation and running simple do not run simply run itself…
I downloaded several versions, found no exe’s, install files or anything ready to run.

#10

You won’t drop out Linux anc Mac support, will you ?

#11

And it’s a bad idea to compile your game with different tools on different platforms, I think. Nevertheless, it’s risky.

#12

Install4j looks pretty interesting too! I never tried it though, but it can create installers for Windows, Linux and Mac!

#13

Did you read the docs at all? Since it assumes you are a programmer and know how to read, you would know that is uses XML config files to build the installer. There are far to many options to create a GUI wizard.

#14

.

#15

problems solved, now it works :slight_smile:

#16

IzPack seems a little useless because it needs a jre to run in the first place.

With the exe file it can create, what if the user can’t download the jre from the net? Say the game and jre are on a CD, can the IzPack exe file install the jre from here?

#17

You’re right. Why don’t they use Java Webstart?

#18

This thread was over 2 years old.

#19

I have used Java Webstart since march 2007 and it was already possible to do this 2 years ago.

#20

I believe the point was that posting to 2 year-old threads is generally a waste of time. It just bumps a thread that no one cares about any more, unless you have some particular reason for doing so.

In response to your post, Java Webstart isn’t a great solution. It requires that the user already have Java. If you embed Java in your application, there’s no question of whether or not they have it or rather they need to upgrade. And, if a bug appears in a later version of Java, it won’t affect your old program. (This happened with some version around 1.4.2, where you then had to add an extra line of code to prevent a potential crash with full-screen exclusive mode or something.)