Interactive 'Splash Screen'

General Discussions
#1

Hi.

I just found this by Sun’s Evan Summers: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/evanx/archive/2006/10/seek_and_deploy_1.html

It uses WebStart to launch a mini-app that keeps the user busy while stuff is downloaded in the background. Would be really useful for us to keep the user busy while images and sounds are downloaded. For example, I think it would suit OrangyTang’s Space Monkeys game which takes a long time to downlaod 30megs of stuff (http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=15204.0).

I’ve seen a similar thing used in Wurm, but this could be a really cool & easy framework that is well-suited for games.

Here’s the webstart example: http://aptframework.dev.java.net/jnlp/cookiejar.jnlp

Keith

#2

Yep, an excellent way to go.

What we really want, though, is for all the lazy-loading in JNLP to actually work (IIRC it doesn’t work at the moment?) so that you can list all the jars and extensions in the JNLP, and have the splash-application popup as-early-as-possible (e.g. a simple static splash appears after only 20kb has downloaded), then switch into the full downloader-app once the jar for the dl-app has finished (i.e. about 50kb later), and finally switch into the real app when that finishes (e.g. another 5 megabytes later, with all the required extensions installed) - but have background downloading of lazy elements from the JNLP continue silently (e.g. level 2, level 3, etc of the game - start playing the first level of a 3-level demo whilst level 2 is still downloading).

Now, that’s what I call “on-demand” gaming :wink:

#3

Yeah they need to get all that stuff working.

I’m actually excited about this project because it would be great if I could free my game from the downloading problems of Java Web Start (JWS).

For example, how many times have you got the JWS error screen: Error: Unable to launch. I still get it every now & then & I don’t know why.

And just the other day I tried playing someone’s game and it said: ‘download stalled’. If I was a normal person & didn’t have faith, I would’ve clicked cancel as soon as I saw that.

With this framework, we could handle all that crap properly & just get JWS to launch the VM after the tiny little interactive splash screen download.

PS: This still wouldn’t solve the under-whelming way JWS handles computers with restrictions on opening ports. All JWS does is pop a dialog & say ‘Error: Unable to launch’ rather than something useful like “Can’t connect to server, this could be because you are behind a firewall. To get it working, …”. Oh well.

#4

You could give getdown a try, which addresses some of the shortcomings of webstart: http://www.threerings.net/code/getdown/

#5

Gee, that’s pretty good. Getdown is what Java Web Start should be. All that corruption checking is really important. That’s probably the cause of many of the crashes I’m getting. Also the simple caching of the files in their own directory is a top design (but so obvious ???). That is a massive weakness of WebStart - we can’t even relaunch our app in a new VM using WebStart since we don’t know where the files are…

The thing is, Web Start is distributed with the JRE and .jnlp files have the correct association - so you can click a link to a jnlp file and it will start a JVM (& not Winzip).

What might be good is to use JWS to kick off the mini-download of Getdown, and then use Getdown forever after. Either that or use an exe-making installer with Getdown. hmmm.

#6

GetDown is GLP though, so if you want to intergrate it into your app then your app becomes GPL. :frowning: