NOTE: None of the answers are intended to be something new, the idea is that if we assume more time on one thing would mean less on others, then what would you like more time spent on?
If there’s a strong response for one or another, it’s a helpful sign to Sun that they might want to consider re-prioritizing their time and resources.
Please add an “Other” option for polls like these…
This poll was posted by Blahblah, there is no “other” 
- jk
My first vote was Promote java for games to the industry. My second is “More bug-fixing for JOGL/JOAL/JInput” and making sure what we have is stable and usable. However, if any of these are picked up by a development team for a commercial game, it implicitly follows that there will be more push for bug fixes ;).
Cheers, Syrus
[quote]Please add an “Other” option for polls like these…
[/quote]
This poll software is unfortunately not too good. It really ought to have an option “let people add new options” which is what I would have wanted to do. Because it won’t let you do that 
just say waht you would have voted for…I think this is the “recommended” way around this problem.
PS I tried hard to cover the issues that people seemd to bring up. There was no selection / filtering - so if I’ve missed something it’s an honest mistake.
I agree with Syrusm. The first priority should be to convince people that they can benefit from using Java. Right now, alot of baseline technology has already been implemented on top of the free stuff that is out there.
We need to attract the attention and financial support of the outside industries. When they see what is possible, the fixes that we want will follow in step.
Dustin
PS just spotted the “modify” button. So, if you’ve got a new one you want added, just say so and I’ll do it.
Perhaps we need another poll… “what should the community here be doing more of” as many of these are not exclusive to Sun.
I won’t comment on the feasibility of any of these except to point out that feasibility is always an issue.
(For instance I’d vote in a minute for the “Double all the GTG team members saleries” check box if I thought it would work but even if there were such a box it is not terribly feasible. Similarly, as the list comes for outside the GTG, none of the other options have been reality checked either.)
I suspect getting Java onto the PS2/3 or maybe the Xbox (good luck!) is a necessary step to reach wide-spread adoption on the client-side in the mainstream game industry, so I figured “promoting Java to the industry” was closest.
That’s actually related to the “open source Java”-thread as I only see it happening in one of two ways. Either the GTG goes does it the “bureaucracy way” and strikes a deal with Sony to develop such a solution, or a portable open source implementation of Java emerges and gets enough support and promotion that production houses integrate it in their PC and console games. Would the second option fall under the “promote games written by the community” choice? (even though a portable VM would be a tool, rather than a game, and even though the community might be GCJ developers rather than us).
If Java can’t get on the consoles, Java will be competing with Flash/Director/BlitzBasic on the client side and C++ on the server side and should shape its efforts accordingly (which on the client-side might mean that the GTG focuses on increasing productivity rather than competing with LWJGL for the bestest low-level OpenGL bindings). I guess that would mean to talk to individuals, like the people that does that kind of development (rather than the people who care whether a graphics API has gone through the JCP or not).
Anyway, these reasonings might provide inspiration for more poll-choices 
[quote]Perhaps we need another poll… “what should the community here be doing more of” as many of these are not exclusive to Sun.
[/quote]
Several people have made personal statements on what they wanted to see, giving rise to claims that they are “minority” opinions only. I just wanted to see what people as a whole thought, rather than listen to a vocal few.
Of course, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue (c.f. my first statement in this thread). It’s not like it’s a “Sun will do whatever gets most votes”. It’s clearly explained as being about indicating any perceived imbalances in sun’s efforts. Surely this is useful information without needing to look at practicalities?
I’m not sure what you meant by your example of doubling salaries. Taking it seriously, where would the money come from? I guess there must be a lot of money being spent on things we can’t see if there’s enough budget to do that.
[quote]Perhaps we need another poll… “what should the community here be doing more of” as many of these are not exclusive to Sun.
[/quote]
Could you explain? Without Sun, there is no community, no central thing binding this all together. Sun is the only organization with cash available to spend on JGO etc.
I’m not sure how these things are not exclusive to sun; I can’t see how any of the possible options are not under Sun’s control, except for “weekly updates” - and here the point is that I doubt people really care what Joe Bloggs is up to, whereas knowing what Sun’s official game-related department is up to is comparitively far far more important.
We are honored you feel that way but honestly you guys are the community. We just provided some tools and a common place to meet.
Ah were it that easy. Yes, Sun has decided to spend the cash on the resources you see here and now. Thats says nothing for or against the availability of more (or fewer) resources in the future. Those of you who work for big companies should understand. Every MRP brings new decisions on where Sun can/can’t afford to spend its money. All we get to do is plead our case for our corner of the Sun world.
Lets look at them then…
More bug-fixing for JOGL/JOAL/JInput
I can’t speak about JOGL/JOAL but I know in JInput both bug fixing and further development has been primarily done by you, our volunteers. (And a hearty thank you, although I hope its helping you out too as thats the point of Open Source.)
A front page that isn’t constrained by java.net
AFAIK we can’t do much about that. Java.net is the resource we have been given to work with.
Weekly updates on what they’re doing
On what who is doing? The GTG? A lot of what we do in pursuit of the next point is sensitive inter-company discussion and involves NDAs. We really DO try to tell you as soon as things happen that pertain to you that we cantalk about.
If I were doing weekly updates right now this week would read “met with a company I can’t tell you about”, “met with another company I can’t tell you about”, “worked with the API of another company I can’t talk about to connect ti to a project that is unannounced.”
This is the reality of the business world in general and PARTICULARLY the games industry which runs on NDAs.
Promote java for games to the industry (publishers
We’re doing a lot of that and things related to it. Again NDAs and private company to company discussions preclude me from telling you who or how.
Again though you cna help too by showing your demos at users groups or whatever and changing peoples’ minds.
Promote games written by the community
We do this every chance we can. You can too. Get out there and talk it up when a game is featured on java.com
Talk to individuals, learn our needs better
No offsense, but individuals aren’t the issue, the industry as a whole is. We do not have the bandwidth to be the personal support of every developer here. Luckily I think most of our developers here are pretty self sufficient. With a bit of help from us on the hardest things you guys generally help each other damn well.
We ARE talkign to key industry individuals. These are people who are in the position to make decisions that will launch Sun’s game technologies ahead in the eyes of the whole game development community.
Work on things secretly, make more nice surprises
Im not sure if that even bears commenting on. We don’t keep things secret because we want to. We keep many thinsg secret because we have no choice.
Wellcome to TRW. (The Real World.)
You could have told everyone about the java.net plans before the event and it wouldn’t have affected the industry at all… or even laid out your plans to release JOGL/JOAL/JInput without anyone batting an eyelid… etc. Any more of these in the pipeline? What if you’ve been working on a Java Game VM all along and a whole load of effort by loads of people has been a waste of time? etc.
Cas
You need to understand this: you are key to the community. You did not merely provide tools and a meeting place (e.g. that in itself has been done hundreds of times before but no significant java games dev community appeared). I presume it’s different mainly because you are part of the same company that not only owns the platform but also provides the first release of new versions, and does so for the three primary platforms.
That you don’t realise this makes me understand a lot better previous heated debates I’ve had with some of you - you don’t realise what everyone else sees you as, and hence don’t understand the expectations everyone else has of you. Hence feel narked if people complain that you fail to meet them…?
People working on the J* API’s have recently cited situations where bugfixes were blocked waiting for a response from Sun, AIUI.
For each of the others I can’t see that you’ve explained how Sun is not a required element (which is the original point), so I’ve nothing else to add, but there are a few points in particular I want to pick up on.
You shouldn’t feel you need to defend Sun’s record on any of these - this thread already makes clear that these are things that Sun is already doing to some extent. This poll is about which of them are the most important / valuable / etc.
The idea is not to comment on Sun’s progress to date, nor their effectiveness, but just to look at whether any parts could be done even better in the future by concentrating on them a bit more; constructive criticism only, please :).
Actually, that would be better than nothing. And it would take so little of your time if that was all you could say :).
I’ve done communities before, please believe me when I say this: there really is value in you saying something rather than nothing (although I imagine the reason it’s the number one choice in the poll right now is that people want it taken somewhat further!)
No, no, and no. How can you possibly go to the GDC and yet also say something like that? The games industry is famous for being much more open than othes - and especially known for sharing openly with each other things that other industries would classify “confidential trade secrets”.
Writing a post-mortem for your $5million commercial project and simultaneously publishing it in a trade magazine viewed by every competitor (they all get it delivered for free!) and on the associated international website would get you fired in a general business environment…
…yet it’s the most popular and enduring aspect of game-developer magazine (so much so that they recently released a book of post-mortems).
There are plenty of other examples too, this is a pattern repeated across the industry. Talk to the GD magazine staff and you’ll hear them frequently say how much they love being in an industry where so much is shared and done for the common good. They are by no means infallible, but they do have a pretty good feel for the industry (at least for the USA parts; they’re a bit out of touch with Europe).
Again, this is a key aspect to community management: individuals ARE the issue. Please note that I did not put “talk to every member of the community individually”. And it’s not sufficient to talk to a few movers n shakers - you need to understand the industry if you want to achieve anything across the industry. E.g. you can be best friends with Sony’s head of middleware (can’t remember his name off the top of my head), and with EA’s lead producers, and the head of Microsoft’s games group - but you’ll still have no idea what the majority of the developers (both by numbers and by market value) want and need. All you’ll have is second hand info filtered from those companies through their own selfish POV.
E.g. there’s no point talking to every developer of an arcadey shoot-em-up, but you should talk to one, e.g. Cas. Regularly. Frequently. Sound him out on things you’re doing. Elsewhere he’s described quite well what and how you would gain from this…and gone further to mention how you should be talking to people on dexterity etc.
I do not for one second believe you have told us everything you could have done (“could” = whilst preserving / maximizing commercial benefit). I don’t know about other people here, but I have worked in several international big corporations, I have run several startups, I have spoken at games industry conferences and even co-authored a games industry book. Across the board (even whilst working in IBM’s research labs) Sun’s GTG currently comes out right at the most secretive end of the scale. Note too that the justifications for that level of secrecy in my prior experiences do not apply for Sun’s GTG (e.g. when supplying a technology to a company for re-badging, and they wanted the world to bleive they wrote the technology themselves; e.g. not selling to an industry but a small number of close partners all of whom were already closely bound by NDA’s; etc).
I have asked what justifications you have that are non-obvious - even just a made-up example - but Chris skipped the question. If you can come up with an illustrative (theoretical) example like the couple given at the end of the last para, maybe it would become obviouos to us, outside of Sun?
POST-mortem…no problems with that on our side!
[quote]There are plenty of other examples too, this is a pattern repeated across the industry. Talk to the GD magazine staff and you’ll hear them frequently say how much they love being in an industry where so much is shared and done for the common good. They are by no means infallible, but they do have a pretty good feel for the industry (at least for the USA parts; they’re a bit out of touch with Europe).
[/quote]
We know the GDM folks VERY well…
Well, ok. Let’s take the example from an investment point of view. What if Sun was making an investment in a company because Sun sees their “Technology X” as beneficial. However that company also sees their “Technology Y and Z” as being just as important (a little bit of ego on their part). Now, if a group like the GTG was working on a technology that could be seen as a competitor to “Technology Y” and it was alluded to publically, what would that do to the investment opportunity and relationships of both companies?
Sometimes, the decision to remain quite may not be for completely obvious reasons. Fortunately, we have not run into this same exact example. But there are particular sensitivities around the work we are doing. When you are working for a company that produces technologies across many different industries/technology lines, the problem becomes a bit more complex.
Again, I already agreed with you that we can do a better job of communicating and have agreed to work on it. We will share what we can and be as open as we can. It may not be obvious to everyone, but we have our reasons. This is another discussion that boils down to opinions and, well, you know the old saying about opinions
-ChrisM
Thanks. As it happens, in that specific example I’d have thought (just a guess here) that in many cases you’d have to reveal it anyway (to shareholders) as soon as Sun got into any formal relationship with the company. But for the sake of argument I’m happy to take your word for it :).
The next question is…how much of your work does this class of problem cover? Historically the reasons given for not providing more info seem to mostly be about relationships with other big companies. Is this because nearly all of your work is either these relationships, or is producing technology that is directly affecting these relationships? Do you folks not really do anything else? Just interested, because to a certain extent it’s kind of hard to know what it is you do, exactly :).
Looking at the voting, it seems that about a third of people (slightly more) want to hear more about what you’re doing, on a regular basis. Perhaps just explaining once what it is you do typically each week, in as much detail as you can (i.e. using non-specific theoretical examples like above) would make people realise they in fact didn’t care - perhaps people just think you’re doing a lot more stuff that you aren’t actually doing, so even if NDA’s etc were ignored, what they think you might say might be very different from what you would actually say. (and perhaps, taking this further, such info could go on a sub page of JGO, like an “About the GTG” page with enough detail that newcomers get a good idea of what you can and can’t do and can and can’t say etc).
Just some thoughts, given the poll results so far…
Of course, but you don’t have all concerned parties find out about it in a public forum. Senstitve matters require sitting down and understanding the position of both sides to arrive as a mutually beneficial place.
With regard to our “reach”, if you will, if we are playing with servers, we need to see who else in the company may be thinking in that direction as well. Software the same. Java the same.
So, and here is the last time I will say it, we will do a better job of communicating to the community what we are doing. I will start a separate forum for the GTG and we will be able to post to it. Our intent is to update weekly.
Fair enough?
-ChrisM
My question to you Blah is how after two days of voting you can began to interpret the results of 28 votes from a board of >2000 members?
If I was to interpert that at this time, I could say that >2000 do not agree with any of the options you gave. But I will choose to interpert this as >2000 think everything is fine and don’t care about your poll. Or maybe …etc. etc.
[mod]
Point being, I’d wait a bit before using the poll results to express anything.
[quote]My question to you Blah is how after two days of voting you can began to interpret the results of 28 votes from a board of >2000 members?
[/quote]
Read my posts more slowly and notice my phrasing. Please don’t try to imply I’m saying something I’m not.
In specific answer to your question, the average number of votes per poll is about 40, excluding the “game-systems” poll which had over 300 last time I checked (and is multi-choice anyway which inflates the results), and the introductory poll with about 100. Given an average of 40, starting to make observations at about 30 is hardly jumping the gun.
And that’s all they are, observations. I’ve not attempted to draw conclusions (as you’ll see if you re-read my posts…liberal sprinklings of speculative comments only). But there is another purpose to this - the choices are very narrow and I ran out of text for each title (you only get a few chars!). So there’s a lot of vagueness in each one, and sparking discussion of them through observation is a sensible way of improving the validity of the results - if people had completely different ideas on what they were voting for, discussion can expose that (and the poll be modified accordingly).
If you like, accuse me of encouraging community participation and discussion (hey, accuse me of whatever you want, but some things might sound silly :)). It’s no secret that I felt the GTG should be doing more to support the community, and I think I would be hypocritical not to do what I could in that direction having already complained so vociferously.
If you think I’m being ridiculously arrogant, stupid, or etc, why don’t you message me about it? I’m happy to explain my actions if you need an explanation. Happy too to discuss my opinions and motivations. But generally I think it would bore the pants off people here…I’m no one of importance or interest - just another forum poster.
I don’t follow you. You havent told me WHAT is different just an argument for WHY.
And “being part of the same company” means that we have some inroads to info. We try to use those inroads to help you and get answers to questions. We are also in a good position sometimes to help pursue things that matter to you and we try to do that to.
But you need to realize that the GTG != the JGO support team. This has been said before but I think it bears repeating. Our charter is really to make a place for Sun technology in the games industry. Sponsoring the JGO is one of many things we try to do to make that happen and, while it may be personally dear to my heart, from a dispassionate business perpsective its hard to argue its the most important one.
There is a thread in Japanese philosophy that says a large part of what you are is what others perceive you to be. But while I find it interesting philosophically I don’t subscribe to it as a practical maxim. If others still perceive us in a mannner that is different then our charter then I would agree that there is a communciation block but thats where it ends-- fixing that block.
Frankly, most of the folks here have seemed to understand where we are coming from and why. You seem to me to be a notable exception.
Dont give me generalities. Give me specifics. If there is a specific problem it needs to be understood so that there is a specific solution.
I don’t. I DO feel a need, as you yourself have called out, to clear up misconceptions.
Only to a point. We KNOW we disappointed many of the older people here when a year or two ago we announced some progress with Sony and then nothing useful came from it.
We realize that people make business plans on what we say and we want to avoid raising expectations until we know we can deliver on them.
This is before your time I think, but ask SWP and some others of the old timers. We are determiend NOT to do that to you again, which often means saying nothing because nothing that really means anything can be said.
DEAD DEAD Wrong. From someone who was in the industry for 10+ years. There are NO NDAs as serious and limiting as those signed with platform makers, for instance.
You are confusing the open attitude of the engineers with the closed approach of the people who write their paychecks and run the business.
This is an easy mistake for someone who only goes to thinsg like GDC and has never worked in the business to make, I will grant you.
That say almost nothing beyond “gee we were smart and made the right decisisons.” Have you READ those post-mortems?? Technical journal articles they most certainly are not.
Oh and by the way, the movie industry does the same thing, in MUCH more technical depth, in a trade journal called “Cinefex.” You might want to pick one up and leaf through it.
And here you missed my point. We love you guys here at JGO. We think that you are the groundswell that will become a tidal wave. And we DO listen to your issues, I hope again those who have been here longer can tell you that.
But the fact of the matter is that Cas is about the most professional person here, as he’s at least trying to market a game. I know you don’t want to hear this but the plain fact of the matter is that JGO by and large reprsents the hobbiest side of the industry. Serious, in some cases brilliant hobbiests, but still hobbiests.
And I will repeat that we do not have the bandwidth to be personal support for every hobbiest out there. Thats in fact is the reason FOR JGO-- so you can support each other. This is a community, not a Sun help desk.
You know what? What you believe is not really relevent except to you. If you feel you cannot believe me then you probably should not be talking to me.
And vice versa.