JGO is without a doubt the best internet community I’ve yet come across. Possibly tied with indiegamer.
Cas 
I don’t think that this community sucks. Maybe it’s drying out a little bit, because talented people are leaving for whatever reason (like Flash… ;D ), but apart from that, it’s fine. I do think that feedback aside from technical statements is very limited here. This isn’t the right place to ask a question about game play. It’s the right place to get comments on NullPointerExceptions. I consider myself to be part of that problem, because commenting the 1000th clone of Tetris/Breakout or Pong gameplay wise isn’t what i usually do, unless it doesn’t work and throws an Exception. It would be great if this could be improved somehow IHMO, but i’m not sure how…
It has nothing to do wiht you that there are some of your games that arent replied to.
Some people jsut are to lazy to try the game.
I am sure I have missed a few really great games.
I know how you feel. when you are kinda talking to a wall.
read the TUER thread. there is like 10 pages of him talking to a wall. People still played the game though. And people commented at times.
Consistent, not coherent. It’s a false friend.
That would jump me up the ranks! I joined about 7 years ago to make one post, and had forgotten. I was quite surprised when I tried to sign up to ask a question in the Java4k 2009 forum and discovered that my username had already been taken.
fully agreed, active and very sympatic community and the right place for everybody to ask for solution when they dont found somewhere else an answer, like the last chance :), really the best I ve meet and the forum-website just run fine.
What the hell? thats INSANE! not KEV!
Very cool man. I wish you didnt have stop with JGO on such a negative note, with people on the forum complaining. You have done an excelent job. I really wish it was done in a spirit of celebration.
Something personal in regards to my attitude on this forum. I only check three forum, LWJGL JGO, and lastly Dream In Code (just to remind myself how bad most public developer forums are).
JGO is great its offered me alot of help and ways to help developers “1 step behind me” to catch up.
One thing though, There are a few old time members (clearly Kev, but others as well) who I believe dont relise that when it comes to topics, they have the final word. You guys have the experience and know how. so If there ever is a problem or tone, that you feel isnt exceptable. Just say “enough”. not with the whole JGO completely. But yeah, i love reading what you guys have to say. even if it means going through 2 pages of noob posts.
THERE IS NO OTHER GOOD JAVA DEVELOPING FORUM!!!
man what a downer. Im upset.
kingaschi I also understand you were met with alot of negativity with JGO some time ago. Yet I really respect that you persevered in delivering a good site.
Oh 1 other thing. CyanPrime please change the name of the Thread out of consideration. I honestly think it served its purpose in raising community awareness.
how do you chang e athreads name? I hav ewondered for quite a while
JGO is in my top 3-5 websites I visit when connecting to the net and has been the case for around 5 years or so.
I cant say I agree with the opinion that this site sucks! I find that most members on here are extremely more knowledgable on gaming than myself (hence my low post count) and generally very helpful and clearly very refreshingly intelligent for the net.
Yes, this is bickering now and again but generally I find this healthy in forming an opinion on whether technology X is better that Y etc…
IMO no change is needed, apart from maybe a “bring back Kev Glass” animated banner or a petition!
It’s not laziness, it’s just that if we’re absolutely honest, they’re basically so bad, incomplete, or experimental, it’s usually not even worth the time spent looking at them. Occasionally a good one comes along and you can tell it’s good because people comment on it a lot. As for the TUER thread, well, that is gouessej talking to a wall, but he seems to like that.
Thing is this is a developers’ forum in the end, and although there’s lots of people who like to tinker with games programming and design not many people ever really make anything worth looking at because there’s not much in the way of artists or sound engineering going on. To begin with all I did here was ask questions. Lots of them I only started posting about my games when they got good enough to post about, which kinda coincided with Chaz starting on the art.
Cas
I’m not very active around here but I have to say I was startled to see a thread like this here. I find JGO to be:
- full of helpful people
- the only site actively discussing VM internals in a comprehensible manner
- attracting newcomers, certainly the first stop if you’ve taken a quick java course and want flex your skills by making an asteroids clone
- definitely not full of bickering, i haven’t noticed anything so it must be far less common than in most other communities
princec, speaking your mind, very cool.
Not everyone is a perfectionist. Its good that you dont need the early stages of encouragement. But alot of developers do. For some people programming is a hobby/retreat. Your right that when a game looks good and is shown in the later stages of development, it gives a WOW factor. But, until a game becomes commercial what point is there to win over an audience if they are just fellow devolpers.
Also from reading gouessej posts. I really get the impression that the guy has so much energy. helps when im out of programming juice, as it always makes me wanna get back to what i was programming.
(euh) can’t believe KevGlass quit 
I’ve been reading this forum for a few years now, ever since I had a course in the now obsolete Java 3D during my study I have to say the average poster here is actually quite a good programmer, which makes it extremely interesting to read some threads, especially when guys like Riven start to discuss the inner workings of the JVM. One thing that’s also mentioned by Cas is that, even though there are lots of talented people here, they don’t tend to make a lot of good games. I think the reason for that is simple: most of us (including me) are following Java gaming out of interest, and not because we’re employed to do it. If you look at my own situation, I made only a single game about a year ago, and sometimes I still make improvements to it, but not too much simply because I don’t have the time, besides work and other things I just don’t have many hours for it.
This is especially clear during the 4k games contest. Suddenly everyone is putting in the hours and the results contain a fairly high number of good games (I really liked the World Rally game btw :)).
So the main reason for the lack of good games posted here is that almost everyone is a hobbyist. That doesn’t mean this forum should not exist though, if you look at Adobe’s forum for Flash (where nearly all people that post are ‘professionals’) and see the ridiculously low level of the average poster there, this place is heaven.
I think it’d be nice if we started to look at the other 90% of what games development is about too on JGO. Just 10% of it is a bit of nifty programming. Then there’s graphics, sound, music, presentation, polish, gameplay, even biz. There are subtopics covering some of this but they’re like graveyards, probably because they’re subtopics.
See, it’s no good expecting feedback for a bit of programming - few people really care enough to comment, with the notable exception of a few like gouessej and kevglass etc. The 4k compo was quite clever in that it places much heavier weighting on the programming aspect of game development (probably why it is so popular here). But the same lessons we’ve learned in the pseudocommercial world are just as relevant in here as they are out there: if you want feedback, or even for people to click and play, it’s got to look good, sound good, play good, and have those bells and whistles. It’s got to be compelling. There’s just so much dross on the internet these days perhaps it’s time everyone took a good collective look at what’s out there and what’s in here and figure out a proper, honest appraisal of it all and have a good think about making stuff better.
Cas
I personally think that things are posted cause people want input. But I have learned (through rejection) that you must develop something as much as possible b4 handing it out. People will look at your game, go “ahh another dumb game” and then never come back. Simply cause they think you will never impove it to the point where it is worth it.
Moreover I rarely even look in the showcase sections.
Ok that is in part to using ubuntu and somehow webstart etc is crappy esp under 64 - why doesn’t sun have a ubuntu repository for jre, they have one for virtualbox
anyways that was a bit offtopic.
I like challenges and troubleshooting in a pure technical matter. I don’t have the gameplay-touch as some ppl do. The only good gameplay that came out of my hands was ultimately introduced by bugs. And as I silly enough make stuff that iether works or not at all(due to something missing mostly) those random gems aren’t found anymore.
I joined this community in part for the recognition that there are problems that are typical in games but occur sporadic in other area’s and vice versa. As usually the case in area’s where something occurs often more effort is put in which usually leads to better solutions. I joined to study those situations and try to apply them in area’s where it occurs sporadically.
true dat!, the game, no offense, has to be appealing and somewhat look interesting for me to try it. Maybe i’m too picky but time is precious
I usually don’t play games here simply because they usually don’t work on my Mac (or Java 5), and if they do work, they might lock me in full screen, take forever to load, write junk to my home directory, or crash my browser. Yikes!
They’re also almost entirely independent of language. Why would people who focus on those areas want to come to JGO in the first place rather than going a site which is focussed on those areas and language-agnostic?
I really like to test game or even incomplete demo on the showcase and give some feedbacks, but here are few things that I found annoying :
- have to register an account without a clear explanation of the game before
- demo running too slow, only on very lastest jvm, or even crashing my browser
- webstart (when they dont requiere to be, I understand it is sometime necessary)
- no screenshot