Java Applets now supported on Kongregate!

I will eventually get around to fixing a few of the niggles and updating the LWJGL release it’s against but I’m too busy on Revenge of the Titans right now.

But seriously - System.exit() can do that??? Sheesh. It should simply throw an exception if you try to call it in an applet.

Cas :slight_smile:

yup on ordinary applets it can’t do that, but remember your using a signed applet, so no more sandbox, you can do pretty much anything :slight_smile:

alternatively, if your ultratron jar doesn’t need to go outside the sandbox, just don’t sign it, and it won’t be able to do that.

also don’t forget to check out all the small things added to make lwjgl applet process more smoother and nicer.

e.g. like the new Display.setInitialBackground(r,g,b) method, where you can choose the background color (default - black) when Display creates a new lwjgl window, leads to a much smoother and seamless switch from AppletLoader to LWJGL Game. Theres even new Mouse methods for stuff like detecting mouse entering or leaving a lwjgl Display or even getting mouse coordinates outside the LWJGL Display.

Yea both of those work for me…

and jeez, Oracle should hire some of you guys, who know the problems and even fixes for them, its amazing the work you guys do for this community.

I shall try to get on the case. Might even do a Kongregate experiment.

Cas :slight_smile:

Kongregate answered me:

[quote]Thanks for your email. We did indeed deny both of these games, though for different reasons. We’re not 100% against Java games, but they provide additional security, compatibility, and difficulty of use issues, so we’re definitely hesitant to include them. While I don’t want to go into the details of the rejection (you’re welcome to ask the dev if he wants to explain them), the short answer is that the games didn’t make sense for us to incorporate given the risk/reward ratio and the terms of the agreement. If Java continues to show strong games and gets to a must-have point then I imagine we’ll reconsider, but right now we’re seeing much more attention on other platforms and so that’s where we’re investigating at this point.

Cheers,
Anthony
[/quote]
:’(

You should ask the dev, would be nice to know.

Other than that, they didn’t close the door completely and would probably be okay with it if it’s a really good/popular java game (something like Runescape).

Mike

From the blog:

[quote](UPDATE: Kongregate has temporarily stopped excepting Silverlight and Unity games. They are working through some user experience issues with offering these type of games.)
[/quote]
It really does seem like Flash is the only smooth way to offer decent content to a user at the moment. :-\

I will take a look at the LWJGL 2.2.2 release this weekend and try and upload a more fixed applet so we can see what the user experience is like. At least, for people with the latest VM installed. Anything before u10 is a writeoff as far as I’m concerned.

Cas :slight_smile:

That doesn’t necessarily follow. Kong has been a flash site for ages, so of course all of their users have flash. Quite a few ask for Flash 10, though, and I doubt everyone has that. I know I used to play games there with Flash 9 and auto-rate at 1/5 anything I couldn’t play for whatever reason. It could be primarily a question of site administrator perception.

Nothing I think some awesomely compelling free content couldn’t fix.

I wonder if the first 10 levels of Droid Assault would be interesting enough as a standalone applet?

Cas :slight_smile:

That sounds great, would be instant hit IMO, you should also copy the method Robokill uses to get users to pay for the game :slight_smile:

Yup agreed, 40% of all java plugin installs are now u10+, could well be double that for the audience you are targeting. You should probably also bundle it with a nice javascript script to detect and provide a user friendly message for those not on u10+. The javascript code Brackeen posted here on jgo a while back is probably a really good option to start with or the Java Deployment Toolkit.

[quote]The javascript code Brackeen posted here on jgo a while back is probably a really good options
[/quote]
Could you provide the link, if possible?

Thanks

i’ve done a quick search and found the thread http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,20065.msg160875.html#msg160875
but seems like the link on Brackeen’s site is dead, maybe someone still has a copy of that script?

Besides the Java Development Toolkit should be good enough nowadays (i hope)

[quote]Besides the Java Development Toolkit should be good enough nowadays (i hope)
[/quote]
Well, that’s the issue. It basically does the job well but last time I used it in previous u10+ versions it stared my game twice the first time Java was installed on the machine. That might be fixed already.