Is java falling behind in game development?

General Discussions
#1

In reading about the new deals Sony has made with game middleware companies with their advanced technology, I wonder. Is Java falling behind in the game development market?

http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=6707
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=6710
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=6708

SN Systems
Epic Games
AGEIA Technologies
Havok

With game consoles evolving into supercomputers and with super advance technologies, Java will most likely never enter into the game console industry. If game consoles become computer entertainment consoles as Sony hopes then the PC game market will eventually drop as I supsect will happen with the new XBox 360 and Playstation 3. A drop in the PC game market means no use for Java in game development.

Would like to get everyone’s two cents on this …

Jeff

#2

In the “good old days” each software house developed its tools in house. However development for the PS3 & Xbox360 will be much more expensive than for the 2nd Gen consoles, so to contain costs, many software houses are buying in toolsets. This means a toolset will be used on many more games, spreading it’s development cost more thinly. This is the cause of the middleware proliferation.

To create a state-of-the-art PS3 or XB360 game requires making maximum use of the proprietary hardware. Thus a top PS3 or XB360 game will never be truely portable, but will need to be at least partially recoded to suit each hardware architecture. So IMHO write-once run everywhere isn’t really an option, making java less essential as a console development language.

#3

It all depends on the market you’re targetting. I suspect there will always be more PC’s than consoles and almost every PC has at least one game on it. I even suspect that much more time is spend behind the PC (work, chatting, games etc) than a console.

If you consider the number of machines being used for work and the time spent on them, I feel fun games made for a quick break will always have a huge market potential.
Especially if you consider that for those kind of games a platform independent, internet delivered solution with minimum set-up hassle (webstart, applets) would be big bonuses, I’d say java is still a winner. And, this is a market accessible by us indies.

If you want to want to make top-class AAA titles for all major gaming platforms, java is not the way to go unless maybe if java becomes available on the leading gaming consoles. But this is a market which is quite out of reach for indies anyway (I guess that even if java would be available on consoles, small indie games would still be mostly played on PC’s)

But this is all based on assumptions made by someone without a clue when it comes to marketing :slight_smile:

#4

At said it ionce and I’ll say it again:
Java Games should focus on PC Games first, as soon as this market is conquored the console aren’t far away anymore.

my two cents :wink:

btw. I’ve played puzzle pirates last day and I’m really impressed, a top desktop game. On the other hand the monthly fee is to high compared to others like WoW. Of course the game client is free and the costs running the servers probably are equal but I’m used to spend money on those fancy 3d gfx. :-\

#5

There is no point in running java on consoles, so it will never happen.

There will always by some java games on home computers, but will never be widely used.

Java already rules the mobile market.

#6

Java has never had any presence on consoles. Java still doesn’t have any presence on consoles. How can you fall further behind when you have nothing to begin with?

The situation hasn’t changed. No matter what the media hype the next gen isn’t some vast evolutionary leap, it’s just another incremental step.

#7

I guess my point is that there are a lot of game developers, and wanabe game developers, like myself :), using java to develop games. I think most of the game developers here would like to see the opportunity to have their games played on a gaming console like the PS3 or the XB360. But with the gaming industry growing with new hardware and new software, more and more game players are going to go to the consoles. And like you stated earlier Java has never had a presence in the game consoles. So if the gamers migrate more into consoles and less into PCs and with Java games only being developed for the PC, then fewer gamers will be playing on PCs which means that few java games will be played.

#8

[quote=“jfelrod1960,post:1,topic:24124”]
Well those fancy computers need a power language to help simplify the programming. Java is a decent language with direct support for multi-threading and massive libraries ready with implementations of all sorts of useful stuff. So there can be a place for Java. Also, most games these days have an online component and the servers are running on machines that could likely benefit from Java tech. It seems that is where Sun is concentrating their efforts, though everything the game tech group does seems to be top secret because they certainly don’t tell us about it. Other than partying at some trade shows who knows what they are up to? :slight_smile: (<- said with a smilie, but I still miss the weekly updates :slight_smile: )

#9

One, there’s no evidence that gamers are abandoning the PC to my knowledge. There are quite a few categories of games that are still under-represented on concoles. (MMOLGs, Role Play games. Flight Sims just t name a few of my personal favorites.)

There are still some fundemental differences between the console and the PC experience. One of these is screen bandwidth. That may change here in the US IF HD-TV ever becomes the dominant home format but it hasn’t yet and doesn’t look like its going to any time soon. ANother is input devices. So far AFAIK all attempt to bring PC type controls (eg Keyboards) to consoles have pretty much failed. Its just plain hard to use a keyboard while sitting on the couch.

But to a degree this is all a red-herring and besides the point. Three is nothing keeping Java from the consoles. In fact, the more compelx the consoles become in terms of multi=processing the better and better a fit Java is to them.

The only issue is, who is going to pay to put a VM there? So far thats an issue that has not resolved. Note however that PS3 will be blue-ray compatable and the blue-ray spec requires a VM…

#10

We don’t care who pays for it. It’s just that if you want to see Java games on a console you’re going to have to put a VM on it first :slight_smile:

There’s no question of gamers abandoning the PC - the issue is the console market is massive and better targeted. A friend of mine who developed Mutant Storm for the PC and Mac has just recently got the game onto XBox Live and it’s doing exceedingly well there after “mediocre” sales on the desktop. I’d love to get my games onto XBox Live but I am totally unable to because of what might be considered a naive choice of technology.

In all honesty I expected at least the next-gen PS to have proper JVM in it and maybe even OpenGL but the world appears to have gone mad.

As for indies, well, they’re your up-and-coming studio developers, but they’re still making a very big point of staying the hell away from Java because a) they’ll never get work b) they’ll never get onto a console and c) who needs Java when C#/DirectX is a far better prospect for XBox?

Someone in that Sun business development dept. needs to extract a finger. In fact… I thought this is what Chris’ job was meant to be about…?

Cas :slight_smile:

#11

On a slightly related note, did anyone ever try GLDirect:

Java + OpenGL + JET (or other compiling solution ;)) + GLDirect = XBox compatibility?

Kev

#12

I’ve had a go with it but not in the last 6 months. The OpenGL ICD driver they provided a while back was, shall we say, a little flaky. What interests me more about the Scitech stuff is that they have also got a statically linkable library of the GL driver which would be more ideal for XBox+Jet.

Having said that - I wonder if it’s possible to get a normal Sun JVM running on Xbox? It’s basically “Windows” after all isn’t it?

Cas :slight_smile:

#13

I suspect it’d be fine to run the JVM (unless of course MS has blocked any processes name java or javaw :)). Its just the visuals that would worry me. Although, I suppose a Java2D game using the DirectX pipeline should work.

It’d be nice to get hold of a dev kit (if thats what you need for XBox development) and spend a couple of days playing about. I’m sure it could work.

Incidently, GLDirect seems to have been updated fairly substantially in the past 6 months. Might be time for a second round.

Kev

#14

Not really. What’s actually happened is more like:

  • middleware was crap
  • there were much bigger problems inside games studios than the quality of the tools
  • …and much much bigger ones than the cost of the tools
    Then:
  • Sony, MS, et al made headway in solving the other problems
  • Criterion finally got a 3D engine right: cross-platform, and “not absolutely awful” (Renderware could not have been described as a great 3D enigne, but at one point it finally ceased to be rubbish)
  • CPU’s got fast enough to spare the cycles for physics engines, and Havok tuned theirs up to be good enough for most studios to be able to use
  • Marketing execs and non-technical Producers started to get all excited about “Unreal” and “Physics”

Ultimately, Criterion’s x-platform was the biggest thing that pushed middleware forwards. Studios couldn’t give a monkey’s about the cost of PS3 tools: what they really care about is being able to write a game once and publish it on PS2 and XBox and PC and GC: that immediately doubles your sales compared to just selling on PS2 (or much more if you were targetting one of the others initially).

Your “good old days” are still “today”: nearly everyone has in-house tools teams that do a lot of work and runs a lot of proprietary code and tools. But now the middelware market has matured enough, and got enough money to be able to produce good product, its much easier for studios to accept the risks inherent in middleware.

#15

Except that it’s easier and faster to develop in, and easier to run x-platform? What most studios would like is if all next-gen consoles used:

  • the same graphics cards (out of a choice of two: one NV card and one ATI card, both running the same version of OGL)
  • the same processor architecture
  • the same OS
  • the same libraries
  • the same programming languages

Cos then your cost required to double your sales by selling on more platforms is almost 0. Net result? You make more than twice as much profit.

Java on consoles (modulo fixing the handful of major problems that make java unusable as a platform for games dev, which we’ve all been telling Sun for the last 5 years, repeatedly) would go a significant distance to getting what studios really want. Give em what they want, and they’ll love it to death. Or, carry on with the status quo, and they’ll refuse to touch it with a bargepole. Games studios are really very simple creatures ;).

#16

Sun sits on a cash pile of $6 billion and could vastly increase it’s java-based revenues (direct and indirect - i.e. including the money from reputation and association with java) by getting java “the choice for games development”.

A few hit games on PS3 and world + dog would flock to java, increasing the DIRECT revenues Sun gets from java (training, cerfification, etc), quite aside from the indirects. A lot of people are influenced by the vociferous games-development crowd (people like id and Unreal).

Is the problem just that no-one who knows how to make a business case in Sun and who ALSO has access to the figures they need to demonstrate the value, has been before the board and pitched it?

#17

It does not matter that there is currently no-one with a clue about how to take Java forward in the gaming space in a position to carve out a market.

What does matter is that the executive has not seen the reason to appoint someone who does have a clue.

You could practically copy Micrsoft’s textbook operation on bringing the DirectX to market. And then to XBox.

Hell what do I know. Why is no board member of Sun appointed to deal with this critical failure to jump into this market? If I were a shareholder - and I’m not, because I’ve still got no faith in Sun to deliver - I’d demand answers at the next AGM.

Cas :slight_smile:

#18

I don’t think Java is the solution. It’s more likely that they will use a cross platform game engine instead. All in all, giving the programmers a comfy language is not high on their priority list.

#19

It’s pretty high on my list, as the man in charge of IT development here. I want tools that stop programmers wasting their time on problems that machines have solved already. Programming time is very expensive.

Cas :slight_smile:

#20

Not the solution, but certainly a solution, and a good one (if fixed as necessary). There aren’t many contenders in this space of alternatives, and if you note that no-one wants a MS-owned platform anywhere for any reason (I’m looking at this console-centric), then the contenders drop right down to a very narrow choice AFAICS: keep extending C++ in time-wasting manners, or just adopt Java.

Ditto.