Ah, a javagaming forum! So nice! 
Guess I will be spending some time here. 
I’ve made some applet-based games over the last years, here is a link to them: http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~runar/games.htm
Front page with blue on green is hard to read. Apoc 2 was fun. Space invaders clone had all the ugliness of early PC games, which I guess is what you were going for.
Hey that Dune clone is sweet, you should make that into a non applet game!
[quote]Ah, a javagaming forum! So nice! Guess I will be spending some time here. I’ve made some applet-based games over the last years, here is a link to them: http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~runar/games.htm
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None of the games worked for me with java 1.4.2_05 and mozilla (grey rectangle, no output to console). The RTS worked fine with appletviewer, although you ought to remove all the copyrighted graphics ASAP if you’re distributing the game publically. There isn’t really a “game” to the RTS at the moment (it’s not implemented yet) but it definitely looks worth carrying on working on - although I agree its a bad idea to have this as an applet.
Some of the other games (like the car one IIRC) didn’t run at all, with a “no valid APPLET tag” error.
All the ones I tried worked fine.
I didn’t get any sound out of any of them. 
The Dune one reminded me of Command and Conquer.
Very nice.
Dune 2 (which that is a clone of) was basically the predacessor for Command and Conquerer. Both were made by Westwood Studios. Both are great games.
I would say that Dune 2 was the grandaddy of the RTS genre.
I still remember the mentat voices when you base is under attack… awesome stuff.
I do agree with Blah tho, you should really watch out with those graphics.
dune 2 totally froze my browser window, and to kill it, i’m gonna have all my other browser windows shut down… (stupid internet explorer)
maybe i’ll come back with ms vm instead?
oh wait! here it is. it took forever and i thought it was crashed.
awsome games, spent the best part of an hour on em! Oops!
DP: Better get back to work.
OtherVoiceInHead: NONONONO, keep playing
DP: But Il get behind on schedual
OtherVoiceInHead: blah blah blah, talk talk talk…
DP: Oh fine, another hour, but just the one.
DP
good stuff
heh. the wraith one was good. sound fx would be nice.
i also enjoyed car… reminds me of some time looong ago. turns too wide tho. can’t make any tight turn tracks
Thanx for the feedback.
Yes, alas, only the latest game is with sound (dranonymous, did you get any exceptions?).
Yes, I ripped the dune-graphics from dune2000… and the starcraft-game is ripped from starcraft. Hmm, and Solitaire is ripped from Solitaire. Perhaps I should learn to paint?.. But the games are not that very public? Most of those games are old anyway, Javadune has been up since 2000 without any complaints…
Why should I make non-applet-games? I think applets is a great way to distribute java-games…
[quote] I think applets is a great way to distribute java-games…
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I think you’ll find you’re pretty much the only person with that opinion. 
Give Webstart a try instead.
What is the big benefit with webstart? I thought more people could actually run the games if they were applets… and no signing and such stuff is needed either…
You don’t need to sign your applications (or applets) if they don’t require it.
The benefit… uhm… well it’s just nicer. Better caching. If you want to play again you can just launch the game from the webstart control panel and you can create a shortcut if you like.
And people like me would try em too (I have java disabled in my browser, because applets are annoying imo).
i don’t see any problem with applets where they are appropriate… for simple games they are more convenient than webstart in my opinion, just go to a page, up comes the applet, no scary "this code is dangerous. it is demanding unrestricted access to your system. it is signed by someone we don’t know, and therefore can not be trusted. it is strongly recommended that you do not run this program. Call the police! call the fire brigade! call the ambulance!!! no one can save us now!!!
i sent a link to a webstart of my game to a friend of mine, who trusts me enough even to send him an exe file, and this warning had him asking a few questions.
apart from that, webstart is fine by me
but this other fun little game exe file i downloaded from www.dodgyFiles.com worked great! my modem lights were flashing constantly, and still are… but there were no warnings so it must be ok hey…?
when you’re done, close the browser after and forget about it… no permanently lingering stuff on your hard drive. for games that you’d only want to try out once just to kill a little time, they’re perfect.
for games you’d play more than once, webstart is good.
you can’t seriously say that making a game as simple as car into a webstart app would be worth the effort?
otoh, it would probably have been easier if you were making the game from scratch to just go for webstart, but it’s already an applet.
[quote]i don’t see any problem with applets where they are appropriate… for simple games they are more convenient than webstart in my opinion, just go to a page, up comes the applet, no scary "this code is dangerous. it is demanding unrestricted access to your system. it is signed by someone we don’t know, and therefore can not be trusted. it is strongly recommended that you do not run this program. Call the police! call the fire brigade! call the ambulance!!! no one can save us now!!!
[…]
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Erm. If you don’t need any special permissions you shouldn’t request them :
You can do quite alot without the need to sign your webstart application. You can do everything you can do with an unsigned applet plus some additional things like muffins (cookie alike files), load/save files (requires user interaction - like file->“save as” in your browser) and you can use the clipboard (requires user interaction, too - but you can do that stuff).
However, it’s still very very save, because you can’t do any damage (except wasting cpu power and/or bandwidth).
yes, i got carried away.
but still dont see much point in converting simple applet games to webstart apps unless u want people to be able to play them offline or outside of their browser, and if you target MS VM, you have a much more convenient medium for those without java.
maybe java should take webstart to another level, download a very minimal JVM (1 mb or so) and download the bits and pieces of the JRE as they are needed for the programs. it might convince more people to actually get it on their computers.
i do admit tho that the automatic download of another vm if the current one isn’t compatible is really nice. Webstart did that for me when i wanted to play wurm and only had 1.5 installed.
Webstart is a better method of distribution than JAR files, but applets are a totally diferent thing. I wouldnt dream of putting jmtetris into an applet, but could you see something like this MS VM thing:
http://www.maylin.net/Fireworks.html
in webstart? they’re totally diferent things.
I wouldnt dream of putting jmtetris into an applet
Why? It’s just a tetris game.
but could you see something like this MS VM thing
No, I can’t… I have Java disabled in my browser :>
But I guess it’s a useless “cute effects” applet… exactly my reason for disabling applets
As always, it’s a question of what fits your personal requirements best. Note, however, that: (some of these are different aspects of the same problem, and all IMHO)
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Targetting MS JVM is an unusual thing to do, seeing as it condemns you to a slow and broken JVM, and prevents you from using any of the advances of the last 7 years.
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Browsers crash. People get really pissed off when browsers crash and they had a lot of windows open (because most browsers are utterly godawful at letting you browse the history - ever since MS released MSIE there’s been almost no improvement in browsers, and instead of getting tree-structured history browsing, we’ve got pathetic “list of all sites ever, in a random order”)
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Webpages load instantly. Webpages where you have to wait can really annoy people. Applets are often seen as “bad” unless they are very small. One complaint I hear particularly often from non-techy web users about applets is this thing about the unexpected undesired wait - and the same is true for flash that takes a while to load, except that a lot of Flash things load in stages and let you do something and give you funky stuff to look at while they stream the rest in the background.
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Web-browser + JVM integration is poor. A bug in the JVM, or a badly-written applet that spawns threads and doesn’t kill them, will screw up the browser process AND if you try to kill it (or the JVM crashes) it will often crash the browser too. This makes people more suspicious that any crash is caused by the applet.
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A lot of systems grind to a halt when loading the JVM, because it’s not permanently loaded as an OS service, so has to be loaded anew each time. Java 5 will improve this, by using shared memory better, but we don’t yet know how much difference it’ll make in practice. People don’t like having their browsing experience interrupted by a 20 second wait for the JVM to start.
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“My PC is not an NC”. i.e. I download apps for a reason - so that they are always with me, on MY computer under MY control and I can copy them, take them with me when I go mobile, etc. Applets have none of these properties unless the user manages to keep them cached (nb: mozilla never seems to let you load an applet offline in practice whether or not it should theoretically still be in the cache; not sure why) or manually jumps through hoops to download them. The downloads aren’t even a single file AND require you to load a web browser just to run them. The NC was a miserable failure, and I don’t like the “you have no data on your computer” model; it was a failure partly because this way of working doesn’t fit with how people like to live their lives!
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Corollary: nearly all games are played offline nearly all the time, unless they are specifically online multiplayer games.
And there my armageddon2-game is declared finished, I think. http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~runar/arm2/armageddon.htm A brand new hiscore-table ready for the taking…