[quote]I can’t force you to like making 1.1 games. But I don’t see anything in the applet that you can’t do in 1.1, so I don’t think it is such a huge differance. Maybe you’ve got a personal grudge against 1.1, but how is it cool not to support it?
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I agree, if you have a online game website and like to adres an as big as possible audience you’d have to stick to 1.1 compatibility. You can do a lot with 1.1 if you put some efford in it. But offcourse there’s a point at which the efford would be too big. FX, we’re looking at the possibilities available creating a webcam game in Java and it does look like we’re better off not sticking to 1.1
Still we need to make it clear for 1.1 users they need to upgrade their jvm, its such a shame 1.1 jvm’s don’t do this themselves…
[quote]Pop up any flash or shockwave game worth its salt and you immediately get a funky download progress bar.
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Yes, It’s a shame Sun never did good marketing for Java at that point. Shockwave and flash integrate much nicer in browser than java applets do. Java applet games are often asociated with dull quickbasic like crappy games.
What im currently working on is a very small loader applet, this loader applet displays a nice graphical loading screen, then it loads and caches the game files. If /when the nescesary files are available it instanciates the game using a custom classloader. Because this loader applet is 1.1 compatible, it can detect the users jvm version and if the game requires a newer version it displays a message to the user to upgrade their jvm. Downside is that because it needs to be signed to do caching / implement it’s own classloader, it will popup a security window. However, this does remove a lot of the most frustrating restrictions encountered when developing applets!
[quote]Just add progressbar =“true” to the applet tag. It should give you a nice progress bar showing the applet loading. To make it even more interesting, you can use the image=“myimage.png” attribute to display an image while you’re waiting for the applet to load. You can even use an animated GIF!
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Thanks for the tip! I didn’t know, I’ll definatly include that in the applet tag for 1.4+ users.