See other thread - I think I found some drivers that should work…?
Otherwise though there may still be issues with the applet :
I’ll have a look at fixing it tomorrow.
Cas
Totally agreed, but I think it’s to do with the level and quality of your game. Milpa is extremely high quality game, I can see it having people “discovering” it for years. However, the stuff I write isn’t that good - it has some initial interest and appeal but doesn’t last for long - so getting quick fix cash make sense (I could I suppose try and write some better games, but I don’t really have the time, inclination or talent). So, again it comes down to what you’re trying to do.
That said, the few sponsorship contracts I’ve seen so far still allow the developer to keep a version of the game on their site. While you certainly would be losing traffic to the portal that sponsored the game there might be a happy medium somewhere there.
Kev
Full screen mode failed, claiming that my pc can’t do it, after which the applet was dead. Otherwise it worked great.
Initialising full screen display
Initialising window
Failed to set fullscreen=false due to java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.makeCurrent(Display.java:690)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.makeCurrentAndSetSwapInterval(Display.java:842)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.setFullscreen(Display.java:513)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.initWindow(Game.java:1323)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.setFullscreen(Game.java:1240)
at net.puppygames.applet.screens.OptionsScreen.onClicked(OptionsScreen.java:163)
at net.puppygames.applet.Area.tick(Area.java:467)
at net.puppygames.applet.Screen.tick(Screen.java:569)
at net.puppygames.applet.Screen.tickAllScreens(Screen.java:984)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.tick(Game.java:1814)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.run(Game.java:1456)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.init(Game.java:687)
at net.puppygames.applet.Applet$2.run(Applet.java:70)
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glClear(GL11.java:582)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.render(Game.java:1839)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.run(Game.java:1457)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.init(Game.java:687)
at net.puppygames.applet.Applet$2.run(Applet.java:70)
Set exception to java.lang.NullPointerException : null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.destroyContext(Display.java:923)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.destroy(Display.java:906)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.exit(Game.java:968)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.init(Game.java:692)
at net.puppygames.applet.Applet$2.run(Applet.java:70)
Is this meant to work, or is it broken?
'cos I got exactly what the others got 
Applet INIT
Applet START
display_parent.isDisplayable() = true
Sat Nov 15 14:21:11 GMT 2008 Game: Ultratron 2.2
Serial 6532398096911398912
java.lang.NullPointerException: Resource configurations was not found.
at com.shavenpuppy.jglib.Resources.peek(Resources.java:122)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.createConfiguration(Game.java:1401)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.init(Game.java:520)
at net.puppygames.applet.Applet$2.run(Applet.java:70)
server running at port: 3268
On half the machines I test it on… it works.
On the other half… it does that.
No explanation yet.
Cas
Same.
Applet INIT
Applet START
display_parent.isDisplayable() = true
Sat Nov 15 15:37:11 CET 2008 Game: Ultratron 2.2
Serial 5086201775048386560
java.lang.NullPointerException: Resource configurations was not found.
at com.shavenpuppy.jglib.Resources.peek(Resources.java:122)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.createConfiguration(Game.java:1401)
at net.puppygames.applet.Game.init(Game.java:520)
at net.puppygames.applet.Applet$2.run(Applet.java:70)
OS = Windows Vista 32bit.
Java = Java 6 u7
Browser = IE 7
Does Flash has a very nice IDE like eclipse? i don’t think so… thats why i use java applets.
i like programming in java but we java applets i feel i am in the underground…don’t you feel the same?
Flash has a good IDE just like Eclipse, it’s called Eclipse. Flex Builder for AS3 is built on Eclipse. Infact, the majority of Flash developers see it as a bit rubbish compared to the “real” flash tooling, but that costs more money.
Kev
i didn’t know… sorry… i will download it and try…
it is easy to translate the code in java to flash?
They also have a free one called Flash Develop. However there is no visual tool with this one, it’s all Flex.
I’m actually using FlashDevelop, but only because I don’t want to pay for tools I probably won’t use in the long run.
Java to Flex isn’t proving too difficult for the simple stuff I’m trying. I have hit a performance wall a few times - have to think it out a bit more than with my beloved Java.
Kev
Have you tried out anything with the Flash version of Box2D yet? While I only worked with the stock examples, I played around with the framerate cap, iterations, steps, etc. and got a buttery smooth 60 FPS simulation with plenty of processing to spare. Is there a particular reason why all Flash games are capped to 30 FPS, even if the client is more than capable of running it faster?
As long as we’re heading off topic: the Flash Box2D can do a lot more than people have pushed it to do. People don’t tend to go with 60 fps in Flash because the graphical overhead is substantial, and tends to crap out a bit on older machines once you pass 30 fps. Also I think there might be some browser quirks with frame rate caps in Flash, I forget the details.
But Box2d is rarely the bottleneck there, and I’ve found that 30 fps graphics with two 60 hz physics steps per frame gives very nice results, on par with the Java or C++ versions. If you have the bucks for the official IDE (I sure don’t!), people have put together some real neat tools for visual editing, where you can basically just drag and drop components and all the physics is hooked up automatically. Pretty neat stuff, IMO.
The main problem with Flash these days is that the VM still has a ton of performance quirks, so it’s a trip back to the bad old days of micro-optimization. Totally bizarre stuff like linked lists being significantly faster than arrays, constructors not being JITed (so I’m told), etc. That’s not even to start on the ways of tricking graphics into drawing fast…
Got a link to some of these? This sounds interesting.
Very interesting. Do you have any links to blog entries or resources where all these odd little quirks are exposed? Or is this just something you pick up over time, as is the case with Java?
The one I know a lot of people have used is here: http://www.box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=367
I’m not entirely sure how updated it is, and I’ve never been able to use it myself since I don’t have the Flash studio.
There are various things I’ve come across, but bear in mind that I don’t program a huge amount of AS3, and I almost never code stuff that’s performance sensitive, so I’ve never checked most of these things myself. And most of the performance advice out there is anecdotal, so it likely suffers from a lot of the microbenchmarking pitfalls that afflict Java performance tests.
Here’s an official paper on the AVM2 and performance that you can probably trust: http://www.onflex.org/ACDS/AS3TuningInsideAVM2JIT.pdf
One big thing that I imagine might come up a lot - even if i is declared as an int, accessing an array as myArray[2i] or myArray[i+1] will promote i to a Number and then cast that back to an int, unless you explicitly block that by writing myArray[(int)(2i)].
That’s bizarre if I’ve ever seen it!
Here’s another list of tips (including the odd linked list vs. array one): http://blog.haxe.org/entry/31 - make sure to read the comments, it appears the array v. linked list thing is contested, so I’d check it for yourself.
Beyond those things, I’d just suggest googling a bit and reading the various blog entries. Some seem reasonable, some seem ridiculous, so always test anything for yourself before relying on it.