Sun To Make Java More Friendly?

General Discussions
#1

Recent stories on the net have been mentioning that SUN is going to update the linux java licence to make it more friendly the changes will be announced at JavaOne
http://news.com.com/Sun+to+make+Java+more+Linux-friendly/2100-7344_3-6068852.html?tag=nefd.top

i’d say its about time, but does this mean that it’ll also be more friendly to game developers?

of late theres been a rather bit of concern over the size of the jre and having to bundle it with you game to make it more compatible this licence might allow it to be more flexable :wink:

#2

[quote]of late theres been a rather bit of concern over the size of the jre and having to bundle it with you game to make it more compatible this licence might allow it to be more flexable
[/quote]
On the contrary: I think the JRE size discussion is getting less and less important with more and more people getting broad band access. I think an at least equally important reason of why JRE’s are included with games is because it’s friendlier for the user as they are typically not used to JWS.
I won’t bet on a license change which would allow stripped JRE distributions after this announcement as I didn’t read anything there which implied that.

For games developers, I guess an advantage may be that java might become more common on linux distributions.

#3

That’s right, but that won’t be from Sun until they turn the JRE/JDK into something L/GPL/BSD/free licenseable. If they don’t (and probably they won’t) then we just have to hope the GCJ team does great work.

#4

Decent Linux installations install Sun Java anyway. There is no licensing issue beyond the ridiculous demands of opensource freaks. E.g. if you can distribute the JRE with your free game, then any Linux distro can distribute it too. The ones that don’t are just being obtuse.

As for the whole JRE size thing as mentioned above it is fixing itself regardless of what Sun does because bandwidth to the end users is increasing constantly… My DSL connection was just updated to 5Mbit/s (from 3Mbit) for not extra cost. When the JRE download from Sun goes at 528kBytes/s there isn’t enough time to even read a web page before the download is done. I know that not everyone has a high-speed connection… but in North America at least, I believe they are now significantly more common than dial-up. The trend will continue in that direction of course.

#5

It’ll be about 5 years before it’s genuinely not an issue by my reckoning.

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

If you’re not living in a city your connection is usually pretty bad and that wont change within the next few years.

Well, now that gcj seems to work (for lwjgl games) I dont really care anymore :slight_smile:

#7

But of course, those areas are, by definition, less densely populated - so the bulk of your customers are still likely to be in areas with faster connections. Unless there are some other stats like people in rural areas have nothing else to do so they stay home and play video games :slight_smile:

[quote]Well, now that gcj seems to work (for lwjgl games) I dont really care anymore :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Yes, that opens some interesting possibilities. For many games that are calling OpenGL bindings to do the heavy work, it won’t even matter much if the performance of GCJ lags well behind HotSpot

#8

Uhm… well, for each city there are lots of villages. I really cant tell how its distributed. Could be easily half of your audience. With a connection that bad you barely download anything… no matter how small it is.

Accordingly to reflexive’s statistics you can have as many as 20%+ modem users if the download is smaller than 3mb and still around 10% at 10mb.

Well, 5-10mb is fine and I wont need more than that. With formats such as mod/xm/s3m, ogg, dds or even tga (lzma does wonders) its really plenty of space.

#9

Here, here!

#10

Shrug. The commercial casual games industry is already moving towards 20Mb downloads as “acceptable, without justification”, so … .TBH, I could care less. If it’s good enough for EA and PopCap, its good enough for me.

NB: whilst they tend to concentrate on USA, note that here in UK most people seem to be getting free upgrades to 8Mbit, or the highest speed beneath that that their line supports. I know people in the rural backwaters of sussex and east anglia who have > 4Mbit on that basis.

#11

I don’t think “rural backwaters” here in the UK means quite the same as “rural backwaters” in the US, or any other large country :wink:

With the exception of a few areas in farthest reaches of Scotland, nowhere in the UK is more than 1~2hours drive from a major town/city.

#12

I’d say even closer…

besides, blah3, those 20mb games we see nowadays are packed with content. Look at what I manage to squeeze into just 4mb - Imagine 5x as much stuff. With a whole JRE in there taking up 10mb games embedding JREs are still only going to have half the stuff in them. Bah. Every year the bar is raised.

Cas :slight_smile:

#13

That’s why we need to look beyond embedded JRE’s and towards acceptance of JWS. Easier said than done, though :stuck_out_tongue:

#14

Sigh… no, just forget Webstart. Really. It might look great to us developers but no-one wants it, at least not in its current form (even Java 6 Webstart leaves much to be desired). And it’s still got the fundamental problem of distribution: unless it’s built-in to Windows it will always be a fringe technology.

Cas :slight_smile:

#15

Works great for us. =)

#16

On that negative note, I just tried to run a Sun webstart game on my sister’s java-less computer & was horrified - you have to click through 4+ web pages to get to the installation wizard :o On one screen, you even have to choose between the JDK & the JRE!

Edit: The default Internet Explorer security checks may have prevented Java doing an auto-launch from Sun’s site. Nevertheless, the JWS install is still too complicated.

Java won’t ever be on Windows though will it…?

#17

Who knows, probably not for the foreseeable future unless some particularly enlightened Sun exec gives it to M$ for free to include in the OS. Which is largely its only hope of surviving the forthcoming .net onslaught.

Cas :slight_smile:

#18

4+ web pages, on java.com? Strange, I thought java.com was there to make the install easier (choosing jre / jdk sigh).

#19

What install URL did you use? There’s a clever one (have a look on the JGF site, try to run a game from MSIE that doesnt have java installed and you should get the link automatically IIRC?) which gets your correct download autoamtically. There’s also “java.com/getjava” which until recently was a lot less clever, but IIRC still gives you one-click-install.

It is already for most machines (Dell, HP, etc).

#20

I note a remarkable lack of Java on all the new machines that have passed through my hands in the last year or so. And there have been many, of all different sorts. It just Hasn’t Happened, again.

Cas :slight_smile: