List of commercial games using Java?

pjt33 · October 29, 2010, 6:31pm

And about 30 other Jagex games.

princec · October 29, 2010, 6:48pm

Lately Revenge of the Titans as well. Although that’s under “Cas’s games”, but that doesn’t help my search engine traffic

Cas

Groboclown · October 29, 2010, 9:25pm

Last time I checked, the Puzzle Pirates MMO was Java based.

Demonpants · October 29, 2010, 11:53pm

And so is Bang! Howdy, also by Three Rings.

Preston · October 30, 2010, 7:19am

Edited, inluding an extra mention of Cas’ newest Titan game.

When there’s an URL to a game available, I’m happy to include it.

bienator · October 30, 2010, 12:53pm

didn’t knew that Vampire: The Masquerade used a JVM for scripting. Was an awesome game back than.
http://www.gamecareerguide.biz/features/19990611/java_13.htm#vampire

IntuitSea · October 30, 2010, 4:41pm

I believe that there are some here you missed:

http://lwjgl.org/projects.php

pjt33 · October 30, 2010, 7:55pm

For RuneScape: http://www.runescape.com
For the “about 30 other Jagex games”, http://www.funorb.com

admin1 · October 30, 2010, 11:46pm

PRO-TIP: It was the first consumer product to ever carry the Java Powered logo. This was, in fact, my first corporate deal I did when I started focusing on games for Sun in late 1999/2000.

And here is Rob Huebner’s Most-mortum on Vampire development ('effing SIGH!):

Using Java as a scripting engine.
We knew from the start that allowing the user community to edit the game was an important part of the design. After working in the first-person action-game market, we saw the benefits of supporting the user community and wanted to carry this idea over into role-playing games, where it is not the norm. A built-in scripting system makes a game engine much more extendable by fans. In Jedi Knight, we created our own customized game language called COG. Creating COG took a lot of effort from the development team; several months of work went into creating the compiler, testing the generated code, and implementing the run-time kernel used to execute the scripts. The end result was worth it, but it cost a lot in terms of time and resources to pull it off (for more about COG, see my article, “Adding Languages to Game Engines,” September 1997). wrote for GDC on why he used Java instead of C:

When starting Vampire, we looked for ways to incorporate a scripting engine more easily than creating our own from scratch yet again. There were several scripting systems we examined and tested. At about that time, another game development company, Rebel Boat Rocker software, was getting a lot of attention for its use of Java technology. After exchanging a few e-mails with lead programmer Billy Zelsnak, we decided to give Java a try. Up to this point I knew very little of Java, and had largely dismissed it as a language suitable only for making icons dance on a web page and the like.

After a crash course in Java, we did a few simple tests incorporating it into our game engine. It passed each one with flying colors. In a matter of a few weeks, we had solved the major challenges involved in interfacing a standard, freely distributable Java virtual machine to our 3D RPG engine. From that point on, the only maintenance required was to add new native functions to the scripting language, which we did whenever we added new engine functionality that we wanted exposed to the script writers. We also trained several designers in the use of the scripting language, and they started creating the hundreds of small scripts that would eventually drive the storyline of the game.

Ever since those initial tests, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. I expected to come to work one day and find out that the Java thread was chewing up 100MB of RAM or eating 50 percent of the CPU time, but amazingly, the system was trouble-free throughout development and never became a significant resource drain. If for some reason we had hit a dead end with the Java system late in the project, it would have easily taken three to four months to get back on track using a different scripting technology. In the end, the gamble paid off. We saved months of programmer time that would have otherwise been devoted to creating a scripting environment, and the result was a system significantly more efficient and robust than any we could have created ourselves.

Link to article here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3147/nihilistic_softwares_vampire_the_.php?print=1

Oh, and it didn’t matter that I delivered this message to the higher ups in Sun at the time…Even showing them Cas’s terrain generator that fit on a 1.44mb floppy…

nonnus29 · October 31, 2010, 2:29am

Awesome story Chris, I always wondered what the ‘inside’ scoop was on that!

kingaschi · October 31, 2010, 3:06am

How about PoxNora? http://poxnora.station.sony.com/index.do

Sinuath · December 1, 2010, 1:05pm

it looks like league of legends might incorporate java :-\

http://www.riotgames.com/careers/job-openings-0

tberthel · April 14, 2011, 2:48pm

My ten J2ME/Android games.

Zepto Towers, MiniSpaceWar, ZeptoRacer, MiniSpaceWar Vector, SantasWorldWar, Obama Stimulus, Don’t Lose Your Balls!, Zepto Wars - RTS (Art by Toke Rasmussen), Zepto Tanks - Multiplayer, and Zepto Tanks 3D.

Mine are not that pro but they are for low end Java devices. Even less than a 99 39 dollar devices can get me 60 fps for new versions of all my 2d games.

counterp · May 11, 2011, 6:51am

A commercial java game: http://www.wurmonline.com/

Rise · January 21, 2012, 11:20am

Long live necro threads … I know, sorry, but I really thought that might be interesting.

You see, in reality I don’t see any big commercial game having to do anything with Java at all.

So I found this interesting thread on the Bohemia Interactive Studio (BIS) Forums: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=128800

It talks about a game “Take on Helicopters” by BIS (a helicopter simulator as close as it possibly gets to reality and still being a game which is fun) which will get JVM scripting support in one of it’s future patches (the game itself was released last autumn).

So, “Take on Helicopters” isn’t that interesting (at least IMHO), but “the other” game franchise by BIS is called “ARMA”, a military game simulator. The ARMA series will reach is third installment end of this year (may also slip into next year) and a comment by one of the game developers in the above thread basically confirms it’s for ARMA3 too: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=128800#3 .

BIS was long known for their scripting support in their games but used something home-baked called SQF and it was/is quite arcane to use.

So, I hope this post is interesting to other parties also … cheers.

gouessej · January 21, 2012, 5:40pm

What about Minecraft and Wakfu (the sequel of Dofus created by Ankama Games)?

Cero · January 21, 2012, 5:50pm

didn’t know that about wakfu. very nice, yet another big game.

kappa · January 21, 2012, 5:53pm

is necroing such an old thread (from 2004) really needed? the featured games section seems to be a pretty good list.

Damocles · February 9, 2012, 4:53pm

The Android Market has one or two java games…

Cero · February 9, 2012, 6:00pm

well what I like about this list is that it focuses on big games
you can write small casual games with anything
big games are interesting.