I justa wanted to thank the Oddlabs guys.
For so many things, really…
Writing a great game that really shows off what modern Java can do. And for letting everyone know that its Java and what Java did for them.
I consider this a milestone-- a GamaSutra interview touting Java as “the smartest decision we made.” I bet noone woudl have predicted that five years ago!
Thanks guys. I don’t know if you realize just how much you’ve done for Java’s perception in the world. And I can’t wait to see/play your next game!
[quote]…Oddlabs’ proprietary toolset, the Lightweight Java Game Library…
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That’s an odd way to put it. There isn’t much to LWJGL that I woud call “proprietary”. Or is OddLabs using a customized version?
That’s an odd way to put it. There isn’t much to LWJGL that I woud call “proprietary”. Or is OddLabs using a customized version?
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Only if you can say that a CVS build is customized 
They must have misunderstood the part about lwjgl. As far as I remember it, we simply stated that we’ve done a lot of the development of LWJGL.
- elias
Yeah I think they misunderstood that.
You might want to let them know that lwjgl is avaiable for anyone to use… kind of an important point for a game-developer slanted article!
Not to open up a can of worms or anything…but I read this response to a discussion at JavaLobby and thought it was great:
[quote]Re: Will Java Become the Game Develoment Language of Choice?
A lot of arguments back and forth. All are partly right and partly wrong. I didn’t read all posts as it seemed the arguments started to move away from what it’s really about.
What I don’t understand is that both sides seem to argue as if the choice is for one or the other. A lot of games don’t need the maximum performance. Those that do don’t need to use Java. Already the game market is dominated by companies with deep pockets that put out unimaginative games that only grasp your attention for a little while with their dazzling graphics. I think having the possibility to develop a game in Java would enable a lot of smaller parties to make their entry with new fun games. Be they portable or not.
I once made a game for SNES which became a reasonable success in Japan. It involved a long stretch of assembly programming which was terrible work to do. But the money was green… But because of the assembler it was also a one-shot excercise. I wish Java had been around at that time, I might still have done games today. In fact: I got involved with Java exactly because of my frustration with this.
As to optimization: hand-coded assembler, coded to the metal is always going to outperform any higher language. But I’ve also learned (the hard way) that optimization never ends. And time is speed. The more time you have to perfect an algorithm, the faster it can get. I think I can say that in general I can outperform with Java either assembly or C or C++ when given the same amount of time to write it. There’s only a small (fraction of a) percentage of the cases where the algorithms are already worked out enough that hand-coding beats it. And those generally get hard-wired into the graphics-card, DSP chip or other hardware after a while.
Lastly, I don’t understand the fuss about the GC either. If you’ve done stuff that really needs performance, you’d know the GC is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant because standard memory-allocation is just too slow. Be it in Java or C. Any program that needs speed will do object-pooling and other stuff to avoid in-game memory allocation. And if you don’t allocate, there’s nothing to be collected either.
“Why produce garbage, when you’re going to throw it away anyway”, Amsterdam garbage-collecting service.
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I thought this sums up the Java game argument quite nicely and is reinforced by the fantastic work the OddLabs guys have done
-Chris
We sent them a mail about it and they fixed it already. Excellent service!
- elias