Once again, Macromedia shows you how to do it. This time, with a config with a simple, clear, friendly, good-looking GUI.
This thing popped-up at me to tell me there was a new version I wanted to download.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html
Yes, I wish Java’s appearance and useability was more like Flash…
Flash has the right looks (Sun should at least have hired some designers to design a more appealing boot screen for the web plugin 
), Flash has a short boot time (ie compared to applets), is very lightweight (It would be great for Java game developers to allow a striped version of the JVM) and most GUI’s in Flash seem more responsive and better looking than AWT or Swing…
That said… I’m still sticking to Java for my webgames 
If you want to do anything different than the standard set of functionality Flash offers you’re better off using Java, it has far less technical limitations (except for the ones summarized above ::)).
Wow! A flame on the javagamings forums from blah, what ever next.
Kev
[quote=“thijs,post:2,topic:25296”]
I was generally agreeing until I came to that nonsense
Flash UIs are some of the most painfully irritating and slow beasts on the planet.
And of course the visual appeal is usually a result of who uses the tool, not the tool itself. I think most applets are done by nerds with no artistic talent, compared to Flash where it seems to get used as more of an artist’s or Web page designer’s tool.
[quote]Flash UIs are some of the most painfully irritating and slow beasts on the planet.
[/quote]
Hmmm I’ve never really noticed this (in the flash games ive tried anyway)
However I’ve seen some painfully irritating and slow gui’s in Java apps. Im not too familiar with swing to tell wether it was the programmers fault or the way that swing works… but in some swing apps whole parts of the gui just wouldn’t repaint until I would overlap it with another window causing it to call repaint().
[quote]And of course the visual appeal is usually a result of who uses the tool, not the tool itself. I think most applets are done by nerds with no artistic talent, compared to Flash where it seems to get used as more of an artist’s or Web page designer’s tool.
[/quote]
True, it’s the right tool for these guys.
You should probably take note that the kinds of GUI you find in flash are painfully simple compared to the ones you find in Java.
Cas
It wasn’t a flame, it was a serious point. Don’t you find that GUI an awful lot more friendly even than the improved ones of 1.5?
My apologies, drunken rambling. Isn’t flash always like that tho? It looks great but is a pain the arse do anything more than a trivial click to jump game?
Kev
A 2.5d first person shooter prototype in flash (by me!):
http://www.mojang.com/notch/flashmaze/
The same thing in java runs boatloads faster, of course, but strict limits leads to creativity… and that’s fun!
java applets give java a bad name, hopefully they’ll be fixed in java 1.6.
btw cool game Markus_Persson
[quote]A 2.5d first person shooter prototype in flash (by me!):
http://www.mojang.com/notch/flashmaze/
[/quote]
Nice demo! What game are the enemy and weapon sprites ripped from? They look nice…
[quote]The same thing in java runs boatloads faster, of course, but strict limits leads to creativity… and that’s fun!
[/quote]
Yes, java is actually much more suited for (advanced) webgames.
Especially with the recent development on JOGL, making it possible to use OpenGL in applets…
[quote]java applets give java a bad name, hopefully they’ll be fixed in java 1.6.
[/quote]
There’s no reason why applets should give java a bad name these days… there are some issues with the plugin like pointed out in my first post, but that’s not too bad when you look at the power you get once its booted. The only thing that holds back then is the (artistic) skill of the programmer… are there other shortcomings as pointed out above you’d like to see fixed in 1.6?
What realy gave applets a bad name was back when Microsoft was pushing its own implementation, I think. Many applets that require java specs >1.1 won’t run on windows OS’es with the msjvm integrated. People associate this with Java being buggy, while its Microsofts fault they didn’t update their ancient technology with some newer Java implementation…or at least aut. update to the Sun plugin.
Nice demo! What game are the enemy and weapon sprites ripped from? They look nice…
[/quote]
They’re from Freedoom (http://freedoom.sourceforge.net/), so it’s all legal. 
That’s my understanding too :(.
But … you know how it is - looks sell. The majority does judge a book by its cover - its hard not to.
Alot prettier if not more user friendly, java LAF is just so ugly.
How will the isuues with applets be changed with 1.6? I would want off the top of my head;
-easy to create custom boot screen, removing the need for the word java to be used at all.
-faster non-frezzing boot ups, i dont know how it works but maybe they should make getting a custom bootscreen showing a first priority rather than getting the vm up and running
The dungeon4ka applet starts in 3-4 seconds for me with java 1.5… doesn’t seem like a huge lockup for me.
[quote]The dungeon4ka applet starts in 3-4 seconds for me with java 1.5… doesn’t seem like a huge lockup for me.
[/quote]
Exactly, small applets boot up reasonably quick, but your average applet game will use external data files like music, map data, models etc. As these external resources will often contain file formats not cached by the jvm (only standard images and audiofiles are), a common deployed technique is to put these datafiles into jar files and feed them to the applet with the archive tag.
The jvm will download all these jars listed in the archive tag, which will make it look like the jvm takes ages to boot. A better way to do this would be to download these resource jars at runtime and show progress in your own customized way. But unless you rename your data sources to .class or .jar extension they won’t get cached, also you won’t be able to read the download progress because of how this is implemented. Now there might be a hack possible to achieve this which I pointed out here: http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=11472
So I guess thats a point that’s responsible for people thinking java applets boot very slow. It would be a nice feature for 1.6 to enable applets to download, cache and read progress while downloading these cacheable files… kinda like webstart offers?
Ah, I see!
A signed applet can at least stash some stuff of its own on the local filesystem.
BTW, the new 1.6 webstart looks rather nicer than 1.5.
Cas
what are you referring to when you say Flash GUI? Flash 6 and higher came with built in component sets which can run a little slow, but before Flash 6 developers were tweening out their own sleek UIs which were wicked fast…
to repeat what was already said, it’s not the tool, it’s the tool user…