Hi,
We’re about to release our latest game, but to enable us to use persistent storage we’re having to build against 1.4; up till now we’ve release 1.3 compatible games.
So, by making it dependant on the later version, how much of our audience are we losing?
The game will be released as an applet/jar, run from a web page. I won’t be bothering with WebStart as I think it causes more problems than it fixes!
Many thanks,
Mark
Cross post.
So, I’m not going to bother replying to EITHER of your threads until you decide which one you don’t want and delete it.
I put it in both forums as it’s both business related and technical.
:
So? He’s right.
And calling a respected member a ‘pompous idiot’ won’t really help you getting your answers around here.
Better luck next time.
Sorry, but I couldn’t believe someone would get so uptight about me posting in two forums.
I’ll delete the other thread and the remark, and then we can all calm down.
http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?action=unread
Many people use that link. So they will see your thread no matter which sub forum you pick.
So, by making it dependant on the later version, how much of our audience are we losing?
Less than 1% (with a 30k sample during the last 12 months it was actually 0.0%). How unlikely is it that someone installed Java many many years ago (1.3 is from 2000) and never upgraded Java since then or reinstalled the OS? Very.
It’s like ensuring that your (opengl) game runs on a Voodoo1. It’s a waste of time.
Wow I didn’t realise that 1.3 was that old!
Back in 2000 we were doing Blastian and all that 3D multiplayer stuff, all in 1.1 - trying to pursuade players to run Windows 2000 and not Win98…
Anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip and I’ll definitely be using 1.4 from now on
Thanks!
M
Ye 1.4 is a nice target these days. Works out of the box on mac and many people have it (or a newer version) installed. You only get slightly higher compatibility if you go as low as 1.1*, which isn’t worth the trouble imo.
(* What you get extra here are people who are still running win9x and who never installed Java separately. Well, that is if your game would actually run on hardware that old with such a slow VM. ROI wise it’s simply not worth it.)
And for 1.5 it’s unfortunately still a bit too early.
Java 5 works out of the box on Mac as well… so long as it isn’t an ancient Mac.
I’m going to give it another year before I migrate to 5.0.
Cas
What the…a year before you migrate to 1.5!
YOu realise 1.6 is the current version, and has been for some time.
I don’t even think i have anything less than 1.6 installed on my system.
There are -source and -target switches.
On my two macs, one has 1.4 and I can’t updgrade without switching to tiger, the other has 5.0
this was roughly the average of 1.4/5.0 usage on macs one year ago, and thus a good reason not to switch when developing games (mac users are know to have a better download/purchase ratio, which makes this platform very interesting)
I’d be interested Cas if you could share your last stats about macos/java versions to see if this situation has changed in the last months or not.
Lilian
Your wish is my command:
2005
1.4.1 1083 8%
1.4.2 11801 92%
1.5.0 88
2006
1.4.1 1249 4%
1.4.2 20996 66%
1.5.0 9285 29%
1.6.0 60
2007 so far
1.4.1 21 2%
1.4.2 264 26%
1.5.0 712 71%
So there we are, over a quarter of Maccers are still on 1.4.x in 2007. The trend is fast going upwards to 1.5 so I expect by year end that the vast majority of Macs will be 1.5. Note that I don’t even get stats on 1.3 - the game won’t run so it can’t send me a log.
Cas
Official production release was December. I wouldn’t say that is quite some time.
If you just embed the JRE, you can use the newest version. That might not always be an option though.
I’ve found that there’s no way to convince people to download the newest version of the JRE - you have to include it with the game. I use to have 2 versions of each Java game posted on my old site - 1 with the JRE embedded and 1 without. Everyone would download the one without (since it was by far the smaller download), and then they’d send me strange emails about how it wouldn’t work.
One guy that I told to download the JRE thought that it was some kind of trojan horse virus. 
So I just embed the JRE now. Once I got real Internet access (instead of dial up), it wasn’t a big deal.
I always build for 1.4, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone complain that they’ve not had a recent enough JRE - they’ve either had a recent version or none at all. Usually it’s Windows or Linux people who’ve installed the system from scratch and not installed a JRE.
Although I quite like JSmooth now - it seems to find installed JREs seamlessly, so people with one already present don’t even know whats happening. If it fails they get a graceful exit and clear instructions.
Embedding works fine for Windows and Linux, but you can’t do it on the Mac… hence my post. Ignore the Mac market at your financial peril.
Cas
Guys, which service do you use you report the web visitor java version?
It seems like Google Analytics do not determine the java version, nor AWStats (at least on my provider). Is there any public web stats service that can report it?
I’m trying to get info off my site before I settle down with Java or Flash.
Thanks!