(Un)Official java gaming faq

General Discussions
#1

I can see some of the people on these boards have been flooded with questions, to reduce the overal workload altogether for everyone, I offer to keep up the FAQ for the boards.

My special intrests are in java2D, but I might as well keep the java3D faq if someone just informs me what I should add. (I don’t know anything about J3D)

Right now I don’t have hosting since my last ISP went down, but I’m getting new hosting one pretty soon.

I’m already adding the frequently used code and then the basic questions like “where can I get free ide/compiler” things. My thought was that every time I make progress I link the code to the faq and then anyone who wants to use it/view it is able to.

I’m also frequenting at forum.sun.java/java game development and gamedev.net/java game development and it seems to be that there isn’t too much information available for new people who want to join the mantrain.

Anyhow, feel free to contribute any ideas and corrections If I’m wrong.

#2

I’d like to see a “java gaming gotchas” feature, including the various long-running bugs, unexpected failings of java (e.g. 1.4’s non-blocking I/O does NOT work the way you’d expect from reading the almost non-existent official docs), etc.

E.g the fact that DirectoColorModel doesn’t work the way it should in 1.2 VM’s ( I don’t know if this is still the case in 1.3, 1.4). Once you knew what kind of behaviour to avoid, you could get it working OK, but it was very easy to break (again, this could be due to long-running open bugs).

Or even e.g bugs that Sun has not yet acknowledged, but are rather important - I’ve logged (successfully) about 15 bugs with Java, but I once found a Sun VM bug that (with the help of a friendly university Computer Science professor) I tracked down to being a bug in Sun’s implementation of the modulus operator. I would ahve had trouble completing my undergrad degree without discovering this, but Sun to this day refuses to accept the existience of the bug (we coudkl regularly reproduce it, but it requried several hundred lines of source code, and Sun were not willing to accept a bug report that long!!!)

These things could be included in a FAQ - but most of them require about 5-10 FAQs each, becaus eof the different ways people will have onf expressing the different side-effecs of what is the same core problem.

Gotchas are of the form “When you see the following symptoms, you probably have one of these problems…” and follow up with “You can tell you have problem A instead of B because…” etc.

#3

How about a JGO Wiki? The Design Patterns Wiki is quite cool and successful. Anyone can add/update content to a Wiki, though a Wiki isn’t as straight to the point as FAQs tend to be.

#4

Yes! A Wiki would be really cool!! I deeply support that idea!!

#5

That seems like what the function of JGO should be, but alas we seem to be on autopilot. I’ve been thinking for a while now that someone needs to put up a real resource site for java gaming (with it’s own forums, emigrating completely would make sense just to keep things centralized). Unfortunately, I’m starting to be somewhat committed to running the Open-Source RTS website now but I think this is a great idea ;D

#6

If you plan to use wiki, use that one.
One of my workmates code it.
I am using it now for almost 1 year and I can say it is really good! :slight_smile:

#7

It looks like JGO’s server doesn’t support PHP. I don’t know if JGO’s server supports servlets but here is a servlet based WiKi: http://veryquickwiki.croninsolutions.com/