Ahh, ok. Nevermind me, then.
And, thank you. =)
Any chance of there being a Magicosm tech demo any time soon? 
[edit:]
I forgot to say that Magicosm is looking real good as well. =) But itâs hard to tell from screenshots.
So when do we kill you? ;D
Please donât. I was attempting to be funny. 
Youâll slide THIS time.
No because its possible to make very good sounds with low sampling and midis with new sound cards. Its also possible to create very crapy musics and sounds with high samples and mp3s.
It means you donât have to rely on the latest graphics to make an excellent game. And if a game only relys in good graphics its probably going to be forgotten very soon.
OpenGL is not a game engine.
Java3D has a scene graph and a very clean API to manage behaviors, lods, colliision, so people can spend time making content instead of building the engine.
Play some classics and study their requests then think again. Most of the new games, these days, the more graphics they have the more crap they are.
[quote]zingbat, although it is very kind of you to tell us all this, you are probably talking to some of the most informed Java3D programmers there are. And a bunch of well meaning incompetents like me . Preaching to the converted doesnât even begin to express it. So appreciate that pretty much everyone here takes most of what you have said in favour of Java3D pretty much as granted. I mean have you seen the screenshots of what David Yazel has achieved in Magicosm?
[/quote]
Yup. Its very impressive.
I very much doubt Java3D is going to die any time soon. Its free, has plenty of downloadable documentation and is stable if well used. The free part is very important, most universities are using it to simulate AI and its te only realiable thing to do applets with 3D content.
I donât discuss that. In fact i think the only perfromance advantage is in being able to use OpenGL 1.4 api and shader technology. But still its only the low level api, if it worked on top of an high level API like Java3D and still being programable in the shaders level then it would be realy impressive.
But still there will be a lot of things missing in that engine . For instance loaders for 3d art, a game editor, an editor for adanced stuff like shaders. I would not mind helping with that but i am having a lot of fun with Java3D at the moment. ;D
[quote]OpenGL is not a game engine.
[/quote]
Neither is Java3D.
[quote]It means you donât have to rely on the latest graphics to make an excellent game. And if a game only relys in good graphics its probably going to be forgotten very soon.
[/quote]
You donât think these relied on the latest graphics when they came out? I guarantee, if Halflife looked five years old when it came out, it would not have took off. Sure, they are still good games now, but pretend for an instant that they didnât come out until tomorrow. Nobody ever heard of them until then. Do you think theyâd do nearly as well? If you say anything other than no, you are fooling yourself.
Whilst a small subset of people here are writing commerical games, the majority just play with hobby games for fun.
In this case, Java3D and OpenGL have their place. Its just a matter of whats good for what youâre doing and what you happen to be interested in at the time.
However, it is a fact that many games today wouldnât get past the starting blocks without some vary increadible graphics (hence why so many games sites show screenshots before things are even close to ready). It doesnât make the game, but it does help.
Iâm not sure why we go on and on with this argument. Generalisation causes peformance degredation (generally ) since youâre trying to cover all bases. It does however make things easier. Java3D is a generalisation of scene graph built ontop of GL/DirectX.
In short, it isnât an either/or, right tool for the job.
Kev
Damn it, Kevin! Why do you have to come in a ruin the fun with logic and sense??
Apologises, I keep forgeting logic and sense has nothing to do with these forums! ;D
Kev
Absolutely true. Most of todayâs games lack gameplay. The 1000th Egoshooter based on the Quake series - now with pixel shaded environment mapping of the entire game universe in every single cartridge case⌠Oh well: you really forget about gameplay when you see this⌠Donât you? I donât.
Actually I mostly play oldies but goldies on my MAME or SNES because half a dozen of those games are much more fun than most of the modern games I came accross the last years.
Sigh.
However I think thereâs a big potential in doing many of those classics in a modern way with Jogl for example, but keeping the smart gameplay.
Realonearcade and Garagegames do this in some way.
I donât know if anyone here played Unreal 2 - I only played through the demo level I got on a PC Zone cover disc but good grief it was boring.
Yeah, I played Unreal 2, and by God! was it dull. Nearly as boring as Unreal 1.
Iâm not sure how itâs possible to write a genuinely boring FPS (after all the gameplay was designed in Doom more or less over a decade ago). But theyâve managed it. Again.
Cas
[quote]I donât know if anyone here played Unreal 2 - I only played through the demo level I got on a PC Zone cover disc but good grief it was boring.
[/quote]
Fully ack. I experienced exactly the same.
[quote]Yeah, I played Unreal 2, and by God! was it dull. Nearly as boring as Unreal 1.
Iâm not sure how itâs possible to write a genuinely boring FPS (after all the gameplay was designed in Doom more or less over a decade ago). But theyâve managed it. Again.
[/quote]
Full ack.
And Iâm pretty sure Doom3 will become as boring as Doom1 has been: more light, more monsters, more blood, more weapons, more gun cartridges - oh âwowâ⌠whereâs the game?
My favourite Puzzle Booble easily beats Doom3 from a gameplay point of view. AND I can play it with my friend on the SAME machine.
Does anyone consider Id and GT (They are still the makers of unreal arenât they?) makes games anymore? I love when they come out with their next games, because I know someone will make something great out of the engine. I think the moding community is where itâs at for these kind of games.
They make some great engines, but since the first Quake where the engine was such a huge step forward that it almost made the game of itself there hasnât been the strong sense of fun about anything single-player from either of those, in my experience.
The engines are very awesome in both cases and in the hands of people like Ion Storm (as they are now, letâs just forget the game that must not be named) some amazing things have been done with them. The thing is that although I donât think people have really noticed games like Deus Ex have actually started to push peopleâs expectations of what you should be able to do in an FPS. You actually think maybe it should be possible to interact with the scenery in more than a button-press ways and that stealth maybe should be possible. I think games like that, which could narrowly be termed RPGs, are actually more of the way forward for first person shooters than most companies making them are aware of.
Funnily enough, the game that reminded me there was fun in first person shooters was Serious Sam, which just did the doom trick of throwing approximately 100000000 monsters at you every ten seconds and the quake trick of having an absolutely kick-ass Co-op mode. Played with a friend over a Lan it was one of the most entertaining few hours of cheap and cheerful pc entertainment I have experienced.
Anyone played Thief 1/2? Great first person sneakers, where you fail if you kill anyone! Great fun and great gameplay 
[quote]I donât know if anyone here played Unreal 2 - I only played through the demo level I got on a PC Zone cover disc but good grief it was boring.
[/quote]
I bought U2 cheap. Indeed the game is boring except for a few excellent parts, but the engine is absolutely amazing (and U2 still comes with UnrealEd which was my main reason to buy it). And thatâs of course its strength. Exactly the same thing was true when the first unreal came out. Boring game, excellent engine.
[quote]Absolutely true. Most of todayâs games lack gameplay.
[/quote]
Most of any games of any era lack gameplay. Nothing has changed in that. There have always been just a select few excellent games in a wide variety of utter crap. Count the number of arcade games from before 1980 and then count how many were any good.