What is Sun doing about Vista's Game Explorer?

General Discussions
#1

Biggest thing to happen to windows for many years: “proper” games will now all get installed in the Microsoft Games Explorer. Windows users will generally not be able to find games that don’t (they can, but since all games are expected to be there, many people will have trouble finding them if they’re not).

I haven’t heard anything about webstart getting a new “is this a game?” option in the JNLP (a change that would requier almost zero effrot from Sun, since its an XML file - they could define the tag now and then implement it in the first convenient-to-them JRE)

But, if they don’t, it may have a huge negative impact on the usage of webstart for games - even to the extent that nearly everyone who uses webstart now will drop it completely, if thats the price you have to pay to be able to install a “game” as a “game” on windows.

So … has anyone seen/heard anything from Sun about this?

#2

Wow! That looks really good, MS provide us with something that can make our games looks like any other game (including update!). Awesome stuff!

Looking at the documentation on MSDN it looks like we’d have to build a custom DLL/EXE for each webstart anyway containing our GDF and other files. Not too painful - but immensely intricate for the sake of some metadata :slight_smile: Webstart could do the task folder stuff and provide us a JNLP->GDF convertor but the way the GameUx.h is setup I don’t think they could build a generic DLL that could be used for all webstarts - short of compiling one on the fly on download of the JNLP :confused:

Kev

#3

Forget what Sun is doing… you know they won’t react fast enough. Perhaps the new open source Java can help and some enhancements to Webstart can be done and then submitted for inclusion in the blessed version.