Howto shareware java games

General Discussions
#1

I’ve been working on a game and I finally feel I have one that is good enough that I’m willing to publish it myself if that’s what it takes (and well, it turns out, that is what it takes). I’m a pretty big fan of the 60 minute demo approach to shareware games, and while it’s not suitable for all games, it’s suitable for the game I have made.

How would you go about setting this up? Armadillo (now known as software passport) Siliconrealms can be used to setup the time limitted demos in their pro version, along with some other important stuff like providing registration key stuffs. The problem here is it pretty much seems to require an exe file, I like jexepack but once armadillo has it’s way with the exe files made with jexepack, jexepack produced exe’s can’t actually run. Excelsior JET does produce exe files that can be executed after armadillo has been used on them, but this is a much more expensive tool which would be less of an issue if users wouldn’t still have to have a jre installed.

Is there some other way to accomplish this, the way I see it, I’m looking at $300 for armadillo and $200 for a standard version of JET which should suit my needs. Anyone have experience with this particular problem or know of a better way to get things done?

#2

I figured out how to make it work with JExepack, armadillo has a section for ‘data after program’ stuff, choosing leave completely alone allows it to work. JET doesn’t provide any features for my game that are important to me that aren’t provided by JexePack for less money. Maybe the professional versions of JET provide something I’d like, but the price difference is very steep at that point. Still, if anyone has experience with this, I’m open to alternatives.

#3

Check out Puppy Games(http://www.puppygames.net/) All their games are made with Java. They also have a pretty decent deal with any developer who wants to sell through their site. They also use Jet for their own games, so they might also do the same for you to increase distribution.

#4

I didn’t see anything hinting of selling other peoples games through their site, maybe cas will show up and enlighten us some. I know cas has a lot of experience trying to sell games shareware.

JET probably works a bit better for him since he builds his games on LWJGL and can probably completely eliminate use of the AWT doing so, which means JET should be able to make a completely JRE independant executable, sounds like an added ‘feature’ for LWJGL though who knows how long JET will have the awt/swing limitation, I remember when JET basically just made a launcher .exe file and you still had all your class files and stuff. Had I known at the start of the project that I was going to be distributing things as an exe file, and that the awt would actually create some issues making that exe independant of the jre, I’d probably have done things different. Who knows, I might still end up doing things different, and converting my graphics/input to use lwjgl.

#5

I think the professional version of Jet allows you to have awt/swing, and I believe Cas uses it.

#6

You can have awt/swing with any version of jet, the problem is that if you use them, even the professional version of jet, will require you to have the jre on each system that your jet exe runs on, the only dependency is on the dll files but those aren’t distributable without the rest of the jre. For a program that doesn’t make use of awt/swing the exe is totally independant of java. Now sure I’ve written plenty of programs that don’t make use of awt/swing, but none of those programs were intended for an end user to run and handle on their own, they were all server side applications. However, like I said before, I believe that LWJGL can fully replace the awt/swing since it creates the window context on it’s own with native code (unlike jogl for example) and also provides methods for handling input (the other big use for the awt).

I could be wrong about lwjgl since I only know what I’ve read in these forums, so I could be wrong about it being 100% independant of the AWT.

#7

LWJGL is 99.99% indepentant of awt. I think it only uses awt on the mac to do some clipboard stuff.

#8

I don’t think JET supports mac so it’s not a loss there.