I hear people speculating about a native tiny webstart tool, couldn’t we do that? I mean, if we just wrote a visual studio app that could download java and jars etc…
Although, the first time you downloaded java with it that’d take over and webstart would be installed, effectively making it a remote-installer for webstart.
Kev
[quote]Would the person who prefers non webstart games please make themselves known? Seriously…I’d be interested to hear any negative issues affecting players at the moment. Very useful to know, even if we can’t (as developers) come up with a workaround…
[/quote]
/me sheepishly raises hand
My main gripe is that i have no control over where the game is kept, or infact whether the game will be kept at all so when i come back to play it again at a later date it has gone and i have to re-download it… which brings me to my next point…
I have ultra-narrowband connection to the internet (19200 baud) due to noisy country phone lines and so any extra download is a huge problem! I like to be able to download files/games by putting them into a download manager so i can queue them up and have the ability to pause the download so i can perform other tasks such as reading emails.
I have tried playing webstarted games however doing so ties up my connection and since i cannot pause, i am forced to wait before i am able to do anything else. As such i now avoid webstarted games to the point i nolonger play games that are only webstart enabled.
For mods… eventually DownloadService and/or FileOpenService and/or signing and open/load the usual way.
@ sillysoft
One of my needs is for people without java installed to be able to run it.
Well, they also need an operating system, drivers for their graphics card, drivers for their soundcard…
So… dunno… “visit java.com and download the Java runtime environment” isn’t that difficult. I mean… seriously… not everyone out there is totally retarded. Everone who’s able to download your game is also able to install the JRE. The “difficulty” is the same.
I feel your pain :-/
@Kev
Chris hinted that sun is planning to do something like that (eventually), but as an applet(?).
Over at JGF should be a small html file with links to all jnlp files (for c&p it into webstart) 
Hmm… let’s see… what makes webstart not so perfect (so far):
[]Use of modal (blocking) dialoges with null as parent - d’oh.
[]No intuitive way of preventing updates. Update? Yes, No, Always, Never.
[]No pause/resume toggle-button at the download screen and no resume in general.
[]The silly message (should be more like the messages you know from a browser - eg without that ~we from sun think that this guy isn’t trustworthy caugh crimminal caugh and that he’ll most likely blow up your machine! No Shit!). Of course it’s ok to warn the users, but there isn’t a need for overdoing it.
[]There should be a way to make applications persistent. That means moving it out of the cache.
[]There should be a way to organize the applications.
[]Certs should be cheaper 
[]… (bitmask) transparency behaves somewhat strange on win9x [only transparent if selected?!]… well ok that doesnt really matter.
Well, actually, what I’d really like to do is a complete webstart service:
But…all of that is going to take some time, and right now I’m tied up with book-writing stuff (publisher deadlines for one book + source code deadline for the CD + contract negotiations for next book - all at once!). If someone has $500 to move JGF to a new host then I could put up the pre-alpha now and volunteers could have access to start working on some of those (although first it still needs a couple of weeks work before the logins and page editing would be working properly).
And I say, no. Using webstart, I would have to let the user choose a directory. But then it should be put on the classpath (how do you get webstart to do that programatically?) and the user should also be given the option to have it unsinstalled when he zaps the game.
Most games require mods to be placed in a specific subdirectory of the root installation. Makes sense to me. Easy to remember where it is. Drop a 1001 mods in there, fine. The unsinstaller can be configured to prompt ‘Would you like to delete the Mods directory?’. Simplicity. Webstart makes this more complex than it should be.
No, not really, even with an installer you’d have to worry about having sub directories within the directory you in which you installed mods. The point being that if you want to support user provided mods then you’ll probably going down the route of direct file access not classpath use. So really, the mods directory (and any mod specific sub directory) doesn’t need to be in your classpath.
This I do understand and agree with. Although you find most uninstallers actually leave any files that they didn’t install in place, (check for most save game files on commerical games). Not that I’m saying its right. This is a failing of webstart but I’m surprised this would be a reason you wouldn’t support it in addition to your normal install (with an appropriate note about mod files).
Incidently, you wouldn’t have to let the user choose a mod directory. You could just do what you do now, assume the user understands their file system and knows where a particular directory is (say their home directory) and assume a directory in there. Of course in both cases this is all based on a whole bunch of assumptions.
Kev
[quote]This concept of modding by having a directory where users can put files has come up twice now. Surely when you do this you provide an option in game to specify where this directory should be? If not, how come? I as a player would want it. If so, then webstart doesn’t stop you doing this.
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What I have done is used a dedicated piece of code to ask the user where they would like mod/resource files placed, as well as a few other config details. It runs once at the beginning and then never again. It is called the installer. 
That’s inferior to doing it in-game, post-install - with your method, I have to re-install if I change my mind ;D.
(just winding you up)