We all know that for shareware/indie games Linux is irrelevant, and mobile games certainly aren’t going to work without substancial recoding, so you might as well rewrite it for those platforms. That basically leaves Win32, Mac and XBox 360.
Win32 + 360 > Win32 + Mac.
Check out http://www.mPowerplayer.com to see mobile games on your desktop. Running through a Java app. Unmodified.
-Chris
I think that’d be true if it was currently free distrbution and use with Win32 and 360. However, it we’re talking right now this minute we’re seeing:
Win32 + 360 (promised in the future with limited distribution) ?= Win32 + Mac
And if we speculate to the future (and I stress speculate) we might get:
Win32 + 360 (with open distribution) > Win32 + Mac
But then we also might equally get (equally speculative)
Win32 + 360 (with open distribution) < Win32 + Mac + PS3 (with open distribution) + WII (with Nintendo cross checking eveything)
but then we might also get
Pigs + Flying > Choclate Tea Pots
The point in my opinion I don’t see the fat lady singing for java game development yet - or even warming up her tonsils.
Kev
True, which is why I won’t be dropping Java just yet. But my point is that the ball is firmly rolling - the 360 XNA homebrew stuff was announced what - under a month ago? And already we’ve seen the release of a good solid framework and plans for much future work. Meanwhile the chance of getting Java on a console is no nearer than it was several years ago.
Out of interest, I’ve not looked yet. What is in the framework? Is it just Torque with a different badge?
Kev
From the looks of things, it’s a reworked and extended MDX (managed DirectX), a whole bunch of C#-ified D3DX code (including a whole bunch of really useful looking collision primatives and the rather nice Effects framework), some extra libraries to make dealing with input, sound, etc. easier, and some game framework-y classes.
Interestingly lots of the hairier bits of DX are either removed or totally hidden - creating a display is ridiculously easy, and theres no need to deal with lost devices and other such nonsense. Most of the DX stuff seems to come ‘pre-initialised’ and ready to run straight away.
Sounds pretty reasonable (which I suppose isn’t a surprise :)) if not revolutionary - anything there that we haven’t seen before other than the future 360 console support?
I’m rapidly becoming a JME fan-boy again at the moment so it’ll need to offer a lot of toolage in terms of speed of development to make me want to spend time there - that or a really really good game example as always 
If the 360 development comes off well and distribution get sorted then it’ll hold potential - if only to port the open sourced Sun VM (should that ever happen ) to XBox 360
There’s an idea Chris, since apparantly the VM is going to be open sourced soon anyway - could you suggest to someone on core VM team to compile the VM against this stuff? Maybe we could have an XBox 360 JVM in a flash? Otherwise we’ll just have to wait til it’s open sourced (circa Xmas?).
Kev
Aye, theres nothing particularly revolutionary yet - it’s currently ‘just’ a nice clean base API which does a lot of useful stuff. More interesting is the content pipeline (which is supposed to include proper dependancies, incremental building and nice VS intergration) but thats not included in this release.