On which platform/console will Jogl be available?

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

Two short questions please:

a) On which platforms will Jogl be available until quarter 1 or 2 next year ?
AFAIK so far it runs (or nearly runs) on:

  • MacosX
  • Linux x86
  • Win32
  • Solaris
    What about other platforms (other Linuxes/Unix’es) and game consoles? Gamecube, PS2, Xbox? Is there Java for Xbox? Is there OpenGL for Xbox? What about the others?

b) Will Jogl (or how SUN’s official OpenGL binding is going to be called) be part of the Java Standard edition in the near future (say: Java 1.5 ) ?

Aside a recent Sun-Sgi-announcement: any more official statements?

Thanks for any hints. Btw with “available” I mean “ready out of the box” - for example like the pre-compiled binary versions available now. Best solution for my intended purpose is still OpenGL being part of J2SE for example.

#2

AFAIK:

Other UNIX(s), assuming they have opengl, should be a matter of recompile in most cases.

Gamecube, PS2, Xbox - don’t want to ask us, ask the manufacturers of those products, they’d have to buy in aswell. OpenGL for Xbox will/does exist (for Doom3) wrapped round DirectX.

Jogl is intended to be part of the standard one day, although I’d guess 1.5 is a little too soon. The developer agreement is in place because it

Kev

#3

OpenGL does also exist on Playstation2 (see http://www.dataplus.co.jp/OpenGL4ps2.html) and Sony has expressed interest on Java.

I remember a press release issued 2 years ago about Sony and Sun working together on Java for Playstation 2, but mainly for bringing web browser and other internet appliances abilities. (See http://java.sun.com/features/2001/06/sony.html)

Obviously, they’ve droped their good intentions so far. Sony is also a member of the JSR-134 which was due to be the base specification for the JOxL set of APIs.

I guess for Sony Java is being explored on a long term strategy, but there are no real plans for the moment…c++ remains the standard for consoles for the current generation.

#4

From all the little tidbits of information the Sun folks drop every so often, I’ve pieced together that the project could have been successful and there was some business reason that Java didn’t end up on the PS2. Based on that, it seems feasible that if the JGI codebase is beaten into shape that Java could show up on a console in the next generation due in 2005.

#5

Thanks for all your answers.

Java on console(s?) in 2005 maybe…? Sounds like PS3 (or whatever there will be) to me. :slight_smile:

#6

That part is really in Sun’s court. What they’d have to do is get Java approved as middleware for the PS3, and the middleware process is more a lot of work on their end than it is on Sony’s end. There was very little stopping them from doing the same on PS2, though that may not have been their direct goal with Sony the last time around. Once a PS3 JVM is approved middleware, Sun could license it to anyone who wanted to make games on the PS3 using Java (ding revenue). They could also license it to tools developers who wanted to make middleware for the PS3 (ding revenue). Finally they could also act as a server farm for online games that the PS3 talks to, leasing Solaris boxen to online game partners who are using java middleware (ding revenue).

The business model implications are pretty huge if Sun acts to move into the console space in earnest and has the right PR person to start getting the word out ( a historical weakness of Sun ).

#7

A JVM on the PS3 would be beyond cool, especially if hobby developers could get access to it.

But what exactly would it be? A Java frontend to the PS3’s gamepads, 3D hardware, etc? It’d have to be a really specific and unique JVM.

Or would it be like a “J2GE” with a whole new set of abstractions and a game written for it could (ideally) also run untouched on the XBox 2’s JVM or whatever. Now that’d be cool.

#8

drooling

Just thinking of the possibilities of popping a CD/DVD into a friend’s PS3 and playing Monkey’s Great Adventure, taking it out going home, putting it into the XBox2 playing some more, and then playing the same disk in the Nintendo Game Sphere.

#9

From the business side - it is unlikely that you would be able to not pay the normal license fees that Sony would require and most certainly you wouldn’t be building your own CD/DVDs and popping them into someone elses retail machine - Sony (and none of the others) has never allowed that.

This would be purely an opportunity for game developers to use JGI APIs on the platform moreso a mechanism for being able to have hobbyist developers able to develop on the PS3 (or other) platforms.

#10

[quote]A JVM on the PS3 would be beyond cool, especially if hobby developers could get access to it.

But what exactly would it be? A Java frontend to the PS3’s gamepads, 3D hardware, etc? It’d have to be a really specific and unique JVM.

Or would it be like a “J2GE” with a whole new set of abstractions and a game written for it could (ideally) also run untouched on the XBox 2’s JVM or whatever. Now that’d be cool.
[/quote]
At the end of the day the JVM is just a boatload of C code - so some standard Java extension could be written that talked JNI to the native C functions and the JVM itself could be optimized specifically for the console in question. Clearly certain APIs would likely get chopped rather than be ported to the console (like Swing), but at its core would be a fairly standard byte-code processing JVM or KVM.