Hi everyone!
I don’t know if I am wrong but it seems that every Java Game librairy development is frozen at Sun. I mean what’s happening with JOGL, JInput and the others? There was no new release for months and there is still no milesotne release yet. Maybe I missed something??? Sorry for my rudeness but I would like to know what’s happening with the developments made by the Java Games Technologies group.
Thanks for your answers.
Maybe OpenGL is just covered? JOGL just finished?
Finished? I wish. Theres still several glaring problems that havn’t been fixed. Every time I nag at the developers they’re always ‘swamped’ with other work and fixes planned for next week/month never get made.
Some of those (most notably 22, which I rasied soon after release, and numerous people have bumped into on the forum) have been hanging around for ages, with little or no visible progress. And if you’ve heard this rant before, its because it came up a while ago. Last time the excuse was the impending release of 1.5. http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=jogl;action=display;num=1073823761
Time to make a switch to LWJGL ;D
So we can ask us what is the actual role/benefit of the java games tech group?
Sssh! They’ll be along in a minute to explain themselves.
I’ll just put the kettle on.
Cas :
[quote]I’ll just put the kettle on.
[/quote]
Milk, no sugar, please.
We are currently up to our armpits preparing for GDC, when we expect to make a number of announcements regarding client-side media APIs including JOGL, JOAL, JInput, and others. Some of these may become public sooner but I don’t have the timetable in front of me.
As for the role/benefit of the GTG, keep in mind that we are responsible for Sun’s strategy and direction with regard to the entire games industry, which includes both client and server technologies for PC, Console and Mobile devices. Much of this involves driving internal development efforts across the company in areas that are not directly related to the Java Games APIs, and in some cases, not even directly related to Java.
Fortunately, a number of soon-to-be-announced organizational changes should enable us to devote more resources to the game-related client-side java technologies.
That’s all I can say for now. Any more and I’d have to kill each and every one of you 
[quote]we expect to make a number of announcements regarding client-side media APIs including JOGL, JOAL, JInput, and others. Some of these may become public sooner but I don’t have the timetable in front of me.
[/quote]
I’m glad that you guys are doing all this stuff… but in term of these announcements - if the core APIs are truly open to the community - being “Open Source” and all that jazz, why is it that the community is so out of the loop with what is happening with them. From your description it sounds like they are still buried in some super-secret JCP/JSR bureaucracy. What’s up with that?
Why so secretive? Jogl/Joal/JInput were touted as open source, community driven projects when they were first launched, yet this clearly isn’t the case. Every time I raise a (perfectly valid) issue I get blown off (if you’ll pardon the phrase) with excuses or unfulfilled promises.
plc posted some code a short while ago fixing (IMHO) a major bug in Jogl, saying “I would be pleased to discuss about it with Jogl developpers”. Then the whole thing just slips into the void, not a peep out of any of the GTG people. Someone hands you a major bug fix and it just gets ignored? Whats up with that?
[quote]I’m glad that you guys are doing all this stuff… but in term of these announcements - if the core APIs are truly open to the community - being “Open Source” and all that jazz, why is it that the community is so out of the loop with what is happening with them. From your description it sounds like they are still buried in some super-secret JCP/JSR bureaucracy. What’s up with that?
[/quote]
To clarify as much as I can, it has to do with who’s working on things more than what’s being worked on, the goal being to ensure these things get the attention they deserve without compromising our ability to deal with all the other game-related stuff we have to deal with. The technologies will continue to be developed within the community, but we recognize that for the forseeable future the bulk of the heavy lifting is likely to continue to be done by Sun and we want to make sure they are sufficiently supported.
[quote]As for the role/benefit of the GTG, keep in mind that we are responsible for Sun’s strategy and direction with regard to the entire games industry, which includes both client and server technologies for PC, Console and Mobile devices.
[/quote]
Maybe there are too much challenges for the moment. Why not just concentrate on more specific objectives like client side java gaming (it could be other objectives)? Having too objectives/requirements in the first interations is just overkill in my opinion even if you have an army of human resources. Having to deliver too much requirements may be reflected in the quality of the deliverables. And I don’t want to criticize any person or product. It is only my opinion.
AThomas,
Let me try to put this clearly and word it properly. Right now Sun (the collective) is essentially burning a lot of bridges with the community which it purports to be supporting. I can say with certainty that the Java gaming community in particular as a whole is nearing a meltdown where unless Sun really pays attention to what’s going on, and acts immediately no one will care and all of your hard work and money will be for nothing. Now I’m not sure who you’re talking to or who you’re working with, but the developers that you will need to move forward are just about done with Sun.
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but that’s the situation we’re in right now. Now is the time for Sun to put out a roadmap - a clear no ‘pie in the sky’ roadmap about what’s coming, why its coming, and when its coming. There need to be regular status reports on this progress and regular updates. This roadmap needs to be focussed squarely on where the community wants to go or I can assure you that by summer what you will have is a non Sun solution (i.e. Xith3D running on LWJGL) and nobody caring at all what Sun says nor listening to them. I’ve seen this type of thing happen over and over all across the open source community when big businesses are involved. Especially companies from the .com era - where announcements meant a lot. The situation is that the developers are ‘ready to go’ and the businesses are ‘ready to go.’ The only party that is not ‘ready to go’ at this very moment is Sun.
I will now outline the major issues as I have discussed them with developers over the past 2 years:
communication - sun doesn’t communicate. Period. From time to time people will drop in and say hi and say that they are working on stuff but hold it so close to their chest that people go off and do their own thing. Sun’s credibility in this space is approaching zero (that meltdown I was referring to earlier). As a board member I can honestly say that I don’t see how the board itself is going to be in a position to help out or resolve the long standing issues that are becoming a rift in the community.
direction - sun has provided no direction whatsoever with respect to where they are going. Where DO you want to go today? If you don’t tell us - explicitly, don’t expect the community to wait and then follow. If you’re working in the server space - that’s nice, but what does that mean for us? I’ve gotten more information out of Microsoft for XBox2 and Sony for PSP than I’ve ever gotten out of Sun and they have MUCH more at stake. Having communicated directly with some folks in the legal department - I know that it has nothing to do with legal matters. The situation simply isn’t being managed in a manner that treats the community as a partner.
support - sun isn’t really providing an adequate amount of support such that it amounts to a Gaming Technology Group. Over 75% of the support comes from people on this forum and we are pretty much in two camps - those who really don’t care about Sun’s involvement and those who are soon to join them. I think if you actually poll people around here you would find that to be pretty much the case. Requests have been going out for assistance with projects, CVS, code, etc. Sun’s responsiveness has quite frankly brought about a level of suck that I just never imagined possible by an organization of its size and resources.
leadership - there is no leadership coming from Sun with respect to Java gaming. If you guys are too busy to do it RIGHT NOW (by GDC momentum will have started to turn… mark my words) you need to be honest with the community and say so. I think you’ll find that the community will rather rapidly reorganize itself and go do its thing. There are many people here, myself included, who can perform the strategic partnership role pretty easily. You can look through Sun and see where the leadership in most of the market is for Java… outside of Sun. The EJB space is being pioneered by Weblogic, IBM, and JBoss group (with Weblogic and IBM specifically making moves to adopt their own specifications without Sun). The JDO space is being pioneered by the JDO vendors. J2ME is being bastardized by every single vendor out there. Webservices are more an adoption of the specifications from others rather than innovation.
I say all of this because I’m hoping that you will take this to heart now while there is time. Even those ‘crossed over’ would consider helping if they saw the above issues addressed. If none of this happens, the GTG will pretty much be dead and the community will do to it what SWT/Eclipse is doing - taking the platform forward without Sun. I emplore you to hold a round table, IRC, etc. on this issue because time is almost up… this community in its current form is about to die. And when it does, there will be no way to resurrect it.
To answer the original question. Internally we are trying to work out how to do a stable release, amid all the other things the GTG is also chartered with. (This isn’t all we do. We are the corner of Sun responsible for all game related activities, from dealing with J2ME handset makers who want to support game developers to large publishers doing massively multiplayer server rooms.)
From my poitn of view on JInput, I see it as primarily community driven. All the major changes in JInput from my initial release have been done by you guys to meet your needs. I think thats terrific and how it should be. The question becomes how to manage this to get to a “1.0” version without getting in you guys way as well as fitting the work load in with the other literally dozen things I need to get done before GDC in other areas we work in.
If someone wanted to step up and say “I’ll take that task”, I’d say “great and god-bless.”
If not, then I am afraid your going to have to wait on my over-taxed workload clearing itself up a bit. Keep in mind that none of what we do here directly generates revenue. That makes it really hard for me to go to management and say “I have too much work and need you to hire more bodies.” Those others of you who work for large companies probably understand. Getting the resources we have has been a fight for us and really an act of faith on the part of Sun. If its useful to you, if you want it to continue, we need your ongoing help and support.
If its not, just say so and we can scratch one big load off our too-full plates (supporting this community and the code we open sourced to it.)
Some people have asked me why I’m posting this, and why I’m contacting people now. I’m doing it because it needs to be done. Irregardless of my position on the board, off the board, working for mother Time Warner, etc. someone has got to step up and build a working structure that we can all agree with - or at least accept. For us to take the next step we need to have a working organization structure that includes the ‘intellectual property’ holders, the developers, the business end users (because damnit we’re ready now), and Sun. The time is now - its time to get cracking… both in the 3D space and in the mobile space. We want to do it with you Sun, but you’ve got to include us in the process.
And so far its worked pretty well. I still don’t have any idea of what features need to be completed for version 1, or whats ahead for version 1.1…2.x - but hopefully someone will architect a plan that can be implemented.
While I have some HUGE disagreements with some of the things that were done in LWJGL (mostly because it makes the project unusable for my business purposes which led to me eventually having to sever my ties because I just didn’t have time for both) there were many things that they did right. They had a clear plan of where they were going, they had a clear plan of when they wanted to get there, and they were very responsive to questions, comments, and concerns regardless of whether or not they agreed. Their process for conflict resolution left a lot to be desired, but it was possible to keep moving forward. If you go to the LWJGL community and ask them what’s coming in the next version I’m almost positive they can tell you feature-wise what’s expected. I even know that its expected around Easter and I don’t even use the product
Indeed I understand exactly what you’re saying - I am in exactly the same situation. However I think that the philosophy that’s being adopted is just not going to work with an open source project in such a dynamic space.
No one wants you to go off and hire more bodies if you don’t need to. What the community is looking for is ‘what is the vision,’ ‘how are we going to get there,’ and how can I help to accomplish that vision. However this is not what’s happening and that’s what’s causing the critical mass of friction. Yes it makes absolute perfect sense for Sun to be working with J2ME handset makers and publishers for ‘big-ass’ lobbies™. However in the process the community is being left in the dark and since there isn’t any direction on where things are going - everyone is going everywhere. People sincerely want to help in whatever capacity they can - not just because it helps them - but because it helps you. I’ve talked to a group of people today specifically on this issue and the one thing that I’ve heard consistently is that they want to go the road WITH Sun, not without it. The problem is that Sun is going the road alone and tossing things back to the community. That’s not the right model and under those circumstances, the model fails and the community dies. The people here aren’t looking for a handout. if they wanted that, they would have just stuck with the existing LWJGL and gone on their merry way. The people want a partner - both a business partner and a development partner. They want a voice - to be able to speak to Sun who is listening to the concern and responding (don’t know how many times today I’ve heard this brought up as THE critical issue).
And the community needs yours. I’ll put it to you this way - suppose your manager/director/etc just one day stopped talking to you. What would you do? What direction would you go in? It is this issue primarily that is building little islands of developers in the sea of talent that we’ve got out there. Our community isn’t that big - we don’t really have talent to waste. Its never been an issue of whether or not the people who are here could pull it off on their own on a technical level - its clear that they could. There are some very bright and intelligent individuals here and they are capable of a lot. But right now, many of them aren’t ‘in the fight’ anymore. Some are confused, some are frustrated, and some just don’t care anymore - which is unfortunate.
You and I could probably list out who all of the big players are and how they can contribute to the collective whole and believe me… they WANT to do so. Many of them just feel alienated by the whole process. Its really up to you guys @ Sun to drive this car. If you don’t, don’t be surprised when it goes down a one-way street. I don’t blame Sun for not getting it right the first time or anything, and the vast majority of the people I’ve talked to in the past few days don’t either. However this whole open source thing with respect to all things Java is becoming a revolution. Its happening all across the Java community. The gaming community isn’t the exception - its the rule.
I can even go back to the JDK1.5 release and how that was handled to further illustrate the problem. JDK1.5 was released in beta form and everyone was told ‘don’t talk about it - use the mailing list, report bugs to us’. Weeks went by before there was a mailing list set up. People were on the verge of tossing the NDA restriction because no one at Sun would answer the questions pertaining to what was going on, what was not to be discussed, when the list was coming, etc. The end result? A lot of people broke NDA, others who didn’t want to got pissed off and just said they wouldn’t participate. Others still upon not hearing anything back from Sun on their defects just gave up. Since I know people in the Intellectual property department personally I contacted them to try and find out what was going on.
The level of unrest within the community as a whole is growing. I’m not sure Sun sees it, but to be honest if things don’t start changing Sun won’t have to worry about the Sun Java brand.
Okay,
So what are you asking for Greg, I want to make sure I understand this.
Are you askling for us at Sun to draft out a vision and plan for the near to medium future of the core APIs? I think it would be heavy handed and unreasonable for us to do so and just exepct you folks to work on implementation but I can see the value of our creating a straw-man to be debated and refined.
I’d be willing to do that for JInput but I definitely want the folks doing the work (Endolf et al) to get invovled then in turning that plan into what they want.
On 1.5, I can’t speak for the folks doing the development there. I do apologize for not being there “with you” as I have been in the past during the early 1.5 adoption but this came at a time in my own development where I really need to keep my development environment stable.
If Im still not getting it then please help me to understand.
JK
Well I have to say that on most points I strongly disagree with this thread and particularly gregorypierce’s post as I tend to take a much more realist perceptive on the GTG as I will shortly explain. This will certainly turn out to be an interesting year.
I’d also like to say that I will temporarily allow myself to trolled by these posts in the effort give my platform so to speak. In the future I will attempt to stick to more industrious topics.
First I’d like to say IHMO that the Java gaming community is not nearing a meltdown, however possibly a vocal few are. In fact, I would argue that the Java gaming community isn’t really posting on these forums all that much, the developers I talk to read the forums regularly to see what’s up but otherwise they go on about their Java game making work.
Additionally, not having a roadmap, or regular status reports for all the years I have been using Java has never resulted in nobody caring at all what Sun says nor listening to them. In fact, it never even resulted in any kind of solid 3rd party Java gaming extensions with the exception of JLWGL.
Besides, having third party solutions is not a bad thing either. The community absolutely should satisfy itself with it’s own work, there is nothing wrong with that. I personally have never let the lack of feature “X” stop me from going on and building apps and demos. Nothing is stopping anyone, and on top of it, everything in Java is free. If you want to build a .Net app you still have to paid MS for the Studio but not with Java, you have several great free IDEs and compilers. BTW, in the gaming community open source has not exactly been successful (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/19/195250&mode=thread) and nobody I know that uses RenderWare is asking that it be open sourced and feeling neglected when they won’t do it even after they paid $50Gs for it. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s exactly because they paid $50Gs that they DON’T want it open sources. But I digress
On to addressing the major issues – communication, direction, support, leadership…
Communication -
If anyone feels that Sun does communicate enough, is this a game related issue? You may be upset/disagreeing with a long standing cooperate culture but the fact is the gaming community is not going to change that much. In fact, the JSR construct is something of a manifest of that culture. Think about how deeply that runs. Sun works tightly with its partners, the JSR is public formalization of that. Nuff said.
Direction -
Here direction is just another way to address the point of communication. If the claim is that Sun doesn’t communicate, it stand to reason it also isn’t providing information on it’s direction. It goes on to rant.
Support -
Isn’t the point of a online community to support itself? This isn’t a paid Sun support forum. Besides, the tech guys like Jeff are posting all the time supporting everyone from game-in-production guy to SERIOUS newbie.
The Java Gaming Technology Group is not some free service donated by Sun to the world or right to the shareware game developer. It is a division within Sun meant to build profit like any other. It is not a non-for-profit organization and really doesn’t owe anything to anyone but Sun. It’s great that the people in that group really try hard to throw the free world a bone, but it is out those people’s goodwill that that happens, not by charter. There is noise from a few people who are not happy with their free stuff, and want more better free stuff, want to know about future free stuff, when the free stuff will be delivered and what it will do for them. This mentality exists in the welfare state too, free lunches are never as good as they could be…
Leadership -
Should Sun really be providing the leadership into gaming space? I don’t think so. And even Sun reps have said this a numbers of times. Sun is venturing into a market it knows less about (as a whole company) and has readily admitted it (although it is learning over the years). If you need leadership from Sun about games, you are the wrong person to talk to Sun. That is exactly why Sun people talk to game companies, to find out what Sun needs to do for them.
This criticism goes on to become really more of a Sun sucks rant than about gaming So Sun is too busy to lead us because of GDC, or SIGGRAPH, or whatever. The same for EJB, JDO, J2ME, and they are also too busy to build our games for us. Personally, I don’t want/need them to lead me. Any arguments around Sun’s stewardship or mismanagement of the Java platform is really just a way to turn up the static and arouse general disdain, and it’s not constructive. (read troll)
Sun maybe not be leading the free community as it would prefer, but it is working with the developers, the publishers and the hardware makers to help make Java for gaming happen.
On closing I would like to say the personally I don’t want to need Sun to lead me or give me direction. I prefer Sun to help out in what ways it can, like running a board, promoting Java at GDC and others, but particularly by cutting deals to get the Java platform on gaming hardware, improving the Java platform, developing technology that game companies can use and to encourage big publishers to green light Java based games so some game companies can get paid using Java so the adoption can get going. All of this noise is not going to assist any of that happening.
[quote]Okay,
So what are you asking for Greg, I want to make sure I understand this.
Are you askling for us at Sun to draft out a vision and plan for the near to medium future of the core APIs? I think it would be heavy handed and unreasonable for us to do so and just exepct you folks to work on implementation but I can see the value of our creating a straw-man to be debated and refined.
[/quote]
Yes, but not exactly. What needs to be outlined is what is version 1.0 of this stuff. What are the goals? if we don’t start defining some goals there can be no achievable milestones which can be attained. Can we do more than that - sure. But we need to start out simple, set up some clear straightforward goals. Once we have these goals, the other IP owners floating around here can comment and we have something to work from as a plan going forward.
And I’m not asking for anything different. Right now there is no plan - just a whole lot of development. I’ve been pushing out OSX releases, working with the Xith folks to get OSX stuff running properly, trying to get the Sun hosting webstart libraries updated for OSX because the ones on the site don’t work, trying to do performance optimizations on pieces of code and shortly I’ll be working with Cas to make sure that interoperability with LWJGL is possible with JOGL - unless there is some technical limitation that prevents us from doing that.
Okay I think thats a great idea. Im going to start a thread in JInput on what 1.0 should be, and maybe 2.0 as a kidn of far-goal. Anyoen inertested shoudl chiem in
I think our first board meeting should be very interesting…
Seriously, Greg, I understand your frustration, which is, in no small part, why the board was created, and why after this discussion I’m glad to have both you and Shawn on it.
I think there’s no lack of motivation or enthusiasm on either side, but I do agree that we need to make sure everyone knows where we’re going (as a community with respect to the technologies) and we’re all pulling in the same direction or we’ll just end up going around in circles. pardon the cliche…
[quote]I’ve been … trying to get the Sun hosting webstart libraries updated for OSX because the ones on the site don’t work
[/quote]
Since the Sun people are so busy, can one of you Sun guys find the time to enable Shawn and Greg to have some sort of high access so that issues like the above can be dealt with be SOMEONE. Right now the community can’t fix that no matter how hard we try. Not only updates but signed jars are needed… and the GTG guys are the only ones with the power to sign a release right now (at least with the same certificate) - but they are too busy to do it.
It these little things that sit undone for so long that bug me. As well as the msgs from Sun folks that say - I’ll get back to you on that - and then we hear nothing for weeks. Because they block those that do find the time (the community) from getting things done.