I’m investigating MoleBox Pro but having some trouble getting it to work. Anyone had any success with it?
Cas 
Ok, I’ve been in touch with the developer and gotten the MoleBox glitches ironed out. Would you all please swivel your download managers to this special version of Puppytron (4MB) and install it (preferably somewhere else other than the original version if you’ve got it) and have a look what it installs. Ignore the scary dialog @ startup, that’s because I built this one with the trial version. I also used low encryption because high encryption doubles the installer size as it’s much harder to compress.
Boy am I happy
Now I can distribute my games on the portals and coverdisks without breaking the JRE license agreement.
Molebox is $199 and believe me it’s worth every bean if you’re serious about distribution.
Cas
Uh, hows that? You’re still packaging your JRE I take it, just in encrypted form?
Kev
Oh, and its apparantly only $99 at the moment for the Pro version
Kev
I’m packaging my JRE, which is compiled according to the strict definition of compilation. This is exactly what Jet does: it takes a Sun JRE, transforms it into some different files, throwing out much of the cruft, and that’s what you distribute. It’s perfectly compliant with the Sun license as no JRE files are redistributed.
I think a champagne is in order as it’s solved the biggest single problem with Java development for Windows.
Cas
Can I have instructions on how to create a Cas ™ JRE now then?
Kev
I was initially excited by this when I read it on the Indiegamer forums, but reading the actual details makes me a little squiffy. What actually makes you think this is any more legal than what you were doing originally ? This would be fantastic if it were completely above board. Is there provision in the license for this or something ? I haven’t read it in a while, ever since I gave up on trying to contact somebody in Sun with specific questions pertaining to the license. No-one ever replied 
D.
The Sun JRE license permits you to distribute only the entire unmodified JRE files. MoleBoxing does not distribute any files at all. It compiles them away, in the same manner as JET (although of course in an entirely different way). This is both in agreement with the letter of the license and the spirit, which is to prevent people distributing broken JREs all over the place and giving Sun a bad reputation, or indeed, simply tweaking the JRE, calling it PuppyJava or somesuch, and selling it as their own work as a JVM. And at the end of the day I still get to promote Java for them as a great platform for games development. Win-win-win!
Cas
Hmm, interesting, but how does that affect user-created mods like extra levels? Thats a must for anything that I do…
To create a Cas JVM: quickly grab the old version of Puppytron, before it’s gone forever, hack the lib and bin out of it, and then do a bit of trickerypokery with VC.net to create a launcher for your game.
Cas
You don’t have to include your .jars in the molebox, I just did anyway for ultra-neatness. You still have a fully functional JVM in there, so you can still load in any jars you like, or remote classes, etc.
Cas
Neat !
Can you leave data files out of the moleboxing and still load them up transparently ? Can you have several ‘moleboxed’ archives (say one with your launcher/jre, one with your main application jars and a couple with different sets of data and what have you) and STILL not have to worry about any load issues and so on ?? The FAQ doesn’t seem entirely clear on this.
D.
-edit- Woops, didn’t see your reply above as regards leaving files out of the molebox distrib. -edit-
Yes, yes, and yes! I can’t believe what a fantastic bit of work Molebox is. I think I’ll try selling it as an affiliate if they’ll let me 
Cas
I also used low encryption because high encryption doubles
the installer size as it’s much harder to compress.
So it’s stuff->uncompressed jar->molebox->nsis (lzma), right?
Hm.
stuff+lzmaed data->uncompressed jar->molebox->nsis(won’t compress much)… should be smaller then, but I’m afraid that the loading time would be very bad then (unless you use some temp directory)
Hm.
small launcher+gzipp data+gzip/p200 classes->molebox->nsis(won’t compress much)… should be a rather nice combo.
Well, if this really solves that license issues it’s clearly a winnar
But it’s odd that the encryption level influences the compression ratio… that sounds like they compress the encrypted data and not the other way around.
edit: oh wait… I guess you didn’t compress at all with molebox and decided to let nsis do that, right?
from the faq:
I presumed Cas was talking about the compression achieved by the installer, not molebox itself.
D.
-edit- must remember to re-read thread before hitting submit -edit-
That’s right. Molebox does the encryption, NSIS with LZMA does the compression. Encryption of course is bound to flummox compression by its very nature.
Molebox adds about 50kb to the total install size otherwise. Happy happy day.
Cas
Encryption of course is bound to flummox compression by its
very nature.
There isn’t a way to turn encryption completely off right now, is it? I mean it’s rather pointless if you also distribute mac/linux versions of the same game.
Happy happy day.
Heh. Yea, it sounds really great
Yes, I turned it off for that beta demo.
Cas
Hmmm… I’m pretty sure that your are still infringing on one of Sun’s licence since you are distributing their classes, even compressed. Maybe not the JRE licence but another one.Now maybe I’m wrong because I haven’t read all of the EULA and I don’t remember the terms.
Anyway you’ll probably have most of your bases covered if you don’t mention the word “java” for that packaged version of the software.
Yesterday I read through those annoying licenses, but I hadn’t found a hint that something like this is allowed.
I read the one from 1.5.0_01’s JRE and from 1.4.2_07’s JRE.
So… I guess you’re going for something like 1.4.2_05 or so, right?