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Minecraft is the only game out there that uses Java

What on earth are you talking about? Lots of games use Java.

Minecrafts sister game comes to mind: http://www.wurmonline.com/

Minecraft came heavily from the game "Wurm Online", where he was co-owner/creator

Unofficial Wurm Online Trailer:

It's basically an a wayyyy more realistic Minecraft. (Yes, I played for a couple months years ago, it was awesome!)

I feel bad that the other creator, Rolf, didn't become wildly successful.

You mean http://www.wurmonline.com/ ? (A MMO that by no accident notch was working on before Minecraft)

Go read the message boards for http://wurmonline.com/ ... there have been lots of complaints about things that were made too fast or easy. But its gamer base is a little odd too.

I've met several people who prefer cut-scenes with quicktime events because they're more engaging. Many people don't like cut-scenes because they feel pulled out of the action during them. I typically disagree and love my well-crafted Drake's Fortune cut-scenes for example, but I understood perfectly when I played Devil May Cry 4 and a long scene was an incredibly long fight that I would've prefered to be involved in.

I think the result is, the GP was right -- these are all debatable issues. Your assumptions are still not universal, and neither are mine.

What Java doesn't have is a good external installer for native libraries. That's the only reason for multi-platform installers. Even 3D games like http://wurmonline.com/ don't have multiple platform installation options; they run through Webstart and install automatically.

He was involved in the creation of Wurm Online before Minecraft as well. He did fantastic things as a one-man army working on that client to do things that hadn't been done before in cross-platform 3D Java gaming.

See also notch on pcgamer.

Have you played Wurm Online?

Now if only the trees would stop swaying so much, I'd be happier.

You may be interested in trying a game called Wurm Online. Its almost completely crafting - based with some very complex setups. Its main weakness is there is essentially no dev content outside the terrain and, on the pvp server, a vague faction war. Absolutely everything else is player driven. The land is completely terraformable. I've enjoyed it as an alternative to Wow type games.

Here

This reminds me of Wurm Online, a MMORPG in which you can chop down the trees, build buildings, and make your own roads, hills, mines, fences, etcetera. Practically all of the terrain modifications have been made by the players.

To answer your question directly: play because its fun to play.

I played HOURS of Qbert and Jumpman Jr. when I was younger ... and what did I get out of it? A highscore. What did I get while playing? Nothing. It was just fun.

If the grinding is fun to do, then its fun. If its just something you do to "get to the fun part" then the game is faulty as a game (although probably successful as a business model).

I've put MONTHS of real time into playing Wurm and enjoyed most of it. Some people would go in and grind for hours to get something they wanted as a skill, while others just did whatever they felt like and had lots of fun doing it. Grind doesn't make a game less fun if the grinding is part of the gameplay.

Wurmonline has experimented with having 'special' people that can suffer permanent death.

I'm not sure what the current state of things is but they had champions of each religion(magical faction) that had better and more powerful abilities in exchange for having a limited number of lives.

The effort required to become a champion was quite extreme but everyone knew who they were. Things got interesting with people hunting them and people defending them.

I would recommend checking it out if you like a game where everything is made by players.

http://www.wurmonline.com/

Don't start playing Wurm then. :-)

By contrast, games like Wurm actively encourage users to simply purchase their in-game gold from their online store. Some players also sell in-game gold through forums at slightly lower rates.

Wurm Online is a 100% persistent HUGE world where you can feel your actions change the world, and collaborative player effort can change it into something entirely different it is. Apart from that its indie, dirt-cheap (5 euro/mo), cross-platform, with beautiful sceneries, and very immersive. All you need is Java and a little patience. Wurm Online Wikipedia Entry

Not flash, but wurm online is _very_ addictive.

Comparing Java to Flash won't win you any friends. Especially since you're assuming that Java == Applets. Why don't you go play some Java games instead?

http://www.puppygames.net/
http://www.wurmonline.com/
http://www.javaunlimited.net/games/db.php?min=0&so rt=5&order=1&screen=0&max=25 -- (Make sure you try Miners, Xero, and fuzetsu. Those are my favorites. Amazing that they fit in a mere 4K, isn't it?)

If you're going to make unfair comparisons, at least get your competition right:

http://www.wurmonline.com/

As a player I'd recommend http://www.wurmonline.com/ to you guys

huge explorable maps, terraforming, deed placement, PvP, 2 maps 16km x 16km each, weapon/tool crafting and plenty more

all for 5 a month or play for free indefinately with just a skill cap

beats wow and all the rest

Agreed... check out http://www.wurmonline.com/. The characters currently don't have animations and there are a few weak elements but it has some serious potential.

they call Puzzle Pirates silly

Well, yeah, it is silly, but in a good way. It is supposed to be a bit of playful, lighthearted fun, not a gritty realistic pirate simulation complete with veneral diseases and scurvy....

And as the article points out, they are doing quite well with that concept. Also check out the upcoming Bang!Howdy by the same team. Java based, just like RuneScape, and Wurm Online. The last one is pretty impressive considering it is made by only two developers.

Play Wurm Online. It's a 3D fantasy MMOG written by a couple guys out of Sweden, entirely in Java. It's a big come-down for people accustomed to Oblivion-level graphics, but it has the outrageous (by MMOG standards) feature of allowing the players to dig up the terrain, rearranging it to suit themselves. You can also tunnel through rock. It's a skill-based game, rather than level based. You can choose to concentrate on any mix of upwards of 70 different skills that pleases you, doing what you want.

Some things to note for all you amazingly twisted "classic" MMOG gamers out there:

1) There are absolutely no quests.
2) Mobs do not drop gold, weapons, armor, tools, panties, or anything else when you kill them. If you're good at butchering, you get meat, furs, teeth, eyes, and sundry other animal parts.
3) Cash is not required. Period. While there is an in-game currency, it is entirely superfluous, if you choose to play that way. Anybody can make any item in the game. (Eventually. Might take some practice.)
4) Two servers, with travel between. One PvP, one not. Don't even start to complain.

It's very much a boutique game. If you're willing to accept that it wasn't developed by a mega-corp, and therefore has some glaring deficiencies by modern standards (characters don't animate), and if you like self-directed gameplay, you might like it. It's one big sandbox world.

Yes, it runs in Linux.

http://www.wurmonline.com/

Porting the full Sun Java to the PS3 would be great, but for real development you'd need Sony (or NVidia)'s help getting the OpenGL acceleration working.

I play Wurm Online, a fairly involved persistent online fantasy simulator which runs in Java and JOGL and games like it could easily be made to work on the PS3 with PS3Linux, if the OpenGL acceleration were available.

But the land is what's magic about Wurm. You can terraform almost everything in the game - chop down forests and make plains, plant trees and make plains into forests, dig canals, flatten mountaintops and build fortification, dig tunnel labyrinths, and more. About the only thing players haven't done yet is fill in the ocean with dirt, but that should be possible the way the game engine is written :-) . So it is more than a war game, in fact the war is almost incidental to building the villages that fight the wars.

Oooo, screenshots

Well, for one thing, it is slower than native code.

Patently false. It has been false for years now. Ever since Chris Rijk published his earth shattering benchmarks. (More recent benchmarks here.)

It's now down to the skill of the programmer. A good programmer will write speedy code, and a bad programmer will write garbage. Who'da'thunk?

For another, its garbage collection has a tendency to result in really bad performance stalls

When was the last time you used Java? 1.1? The modern hotspot JVM uses a generational collector which should NEVER stall during runtime unless it begins running into memory pressure. Go try this game and tell us how many stalls you see. If you think that's too "simple", try this one.

For another, its portability has been hampered by not fully supporting interesting OS features, which means that there are all these OS-specific extensions to add things like audio support,

Is there something wrong with the javax.sound packages? I'm REALLY thinking that you haven't tried Java since 1.1.

They don't integrate well with other apps, don't do a good job of supporting OS services, etc.

Psst!

Finally, Java makes it hard to add debug functionality into your code without a performance hit.

That's just a weak argument. Debugging info can really screw up a codebase and should be removed after debugging. But if you're wedded to the idea, get one of the three billion preprocessors that are available.

The bottom line is that pretty much any compiled language has great advantages over Java.

The bottom line is that you haven't used Java since the days of 1.1, but you feel that you're fully qualified to make statements about a platform you know nothing about. Whether you intend to or not, you are trolling, sir. So I would ask you to stop spreading FUD by not commenting on Java until you are again familiar with the platform.

One 4K version of tetris on that page uses almost 40 MB of RAM after a few minutes

Did you consider that the memory you're seeing may be JVM overhead combined with pre-allocation? In smaller devices (like Cell Phones), the JVM is built into the device. So there's no real overhead for Java. The pre-allocation is also smaller to compensate for the smaller device. Considering that many of these devices have barely 64K available (never mind 120K), I'd say that Java fits just fine.

and after playing for a while there's occasional, noticeable pauses for garbage collection (yes, I verified it was from garbage collection)

I find it interesting that you singled out such an example without looking at many of the more interesting examples like T4XI, Robotron 4096, and Hunters 4K. Also, you may find Tetris 4K to be a much better version than the first item on the list.

Java's great for some tasks, it's almost like a cross-platform VB. But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.

You don't know what you're talking about.

At one point I could have pointed to the poor performance and massive memory usage of VegaStrike. Does that mean that C/C++ is a "bad" langauge? NO! It means that it was poorly coded and still needed lots of work done. The developers worked on improving their codebase, and low-and-behold, the game got better. Perhaps it wasn't the language after all?

Java code runs slow enough to make it impractical for desktop apps.

Utter nonsense. Do you use Azureus? Perhaps you've played WURM Online? Do you need to clean up your hard drive?

The Java is slow myth is a load of hogwash that opponents of the technology use to justify their stance against it. It's simply not true, and hasn't been true for a very long time. And if you don't believe me, talk to NASA.

Wurm Online uses java and I believe the performance is just fine.

Java? You're kidding, right?

Java has improved a lot since 1997. In particular it has had accelerated 3d support for a while now. If you have a recent version of Java installed you can play a 3d Java MMORPG right now just by clicking here. (I'm not endorsing the quality of this particular MMORPG, which I was able to confuse badly just by moving the mouse wheel, but it does illustrate my point about Java 3d support.)

There's fighting in it, but it's far from the main focus of the game. In fact, I don't think more than half the players have ever fought at all except to fend of agressive wildlife.

A few points:

1. Most of the "management" apps are written by people who are not experts in the Java language, thus tend to fubar it pretty well. This is changing, but slowly.

2. Sun is aware of the remote X issues. This is something they are being slow about addressing, but I believe 1.5 should show a marked performance improvement.

3. P2P programs tend to eat a lot of system resources during operation. This doesn't have so much to do with Java as in the way they are designed.

4. The majority of "good" Java software is outside of the area of Desktop applications. Desktop is still an underdeveloped area for Java.

5. Java programs will always take more resources on a mainstream machine. This is due to the fact that the JVM replicates a lot of the functionality of the OS. In instances where the JVM *is* the OS (e.g. embedded development) the difference in resources is insignificant.

Here are a few examples of Java Desktop programs that do their job extremely well:

Azureus
Wurm Online
JGoodies JDiskReport
DataDino Database Explorer
A few games I wrote for a 4k contest.

wow this game is really quite good for free. It is like A tale in the Desert and has some nice wavy grass, reflections and thick foliage. You need a hefty graphics card to take all the settings, but its fine on low settings too.

Check it out. http://www.wurmonline.com/client/wurmclient.jnlp

Sorry, I generally agree with what you're saying, but you tweaked my feathers on one point:

Compare a nicely-fleshed-out Windows application, with automatic visual styles and Direct3D and OpenFileDialog boxes, with wonky Java applets that might run in a browser, and might just break.

NOBODY and I do mean NOBODY writes Java Applets any more. Java Applications are what have been working to displace Windows dominance. A few examples:

Azureus Bit Torrent Client
Thinkfree Office Suite
DataDino Database Explorer
Disk Analyzer

Games too:

Wurm Online
My 4K games
Big game list

So PLEASE don't mention Java Applets. You're likely to get stoned for it.

Oh, go jump off a (virtual) cliff. Java can handle "soft" realtime just fine, and extensions are being worked on for "hard" realtime support. And yes, some people actually write device drivers in Java. Java isn't slow because it's actually slow, it slow because:

1. C programmers write 10 lines of REALLY LOUSY Java code and decide that proves their point about Java being slow.

2. People like you WANT it to be slow. I'm sorry, comparing Java programming against device driver writing? That's the height of hypocrisy. Just because you're sore that *you* can't write high performance Java code while maintaining the beauty of an OO design, doesn't mean you have to take it out on everyone else.

BTW:

4k games
Amazing OpenGL game
More Java games
JDiskReport
Best BitTorrent client ever

etc, etc, etc.

Uh, have you SEEN Java games that use OpenGL? It's a disgrace. I can't believe people like you bother to defend it.

I have, but apparently you haven't. Let me introduce you:

Wurm Online
Cosmic Trip
Alien Flux

In my experience, C or C++ is faster across the board, regardless how piss-poor the coder is.

You mean, in your bias C or C++ is faster across the board. From your first paragraph, it seems obvious that you've never used any serious Java apps. OTOH, it may very well be the result of a new syndrome that's been forming. People don't know they're using Java! A perfect example of this is the #1 BitTorrent app, Azureus. It looks and works so good that no one questions what is under the hood!

Fine. Then I'll take back my gaming libraries. After all, what use is one of the most popular Java Gaming libraries in existence from a mere "armchair manager"? But you're the one who's breaking it to the Wurm Online project. And after that, maybe I'll take back my hundreds of other contributions to compression software, SQL Server drivers, popular Look and Feels, etc.

Agreed. Its improving though. I think Java's gaming future on desktops probably lie in that area where you need the ease of deployment of Macromedia Flash, but with the sophistication of a fully developed programming langauge. Its still early, but there are a few java games out there that exploit these strengths, such as Wurm Online (a mmorpg that is multiplatform, uses opengl via jogl and doesn't require an install, just click and play!)

Have you tried any of those? You might be pleasantly surprised.

DataDino is a database management tool similar to Toad. It slices, it dices, it edits data and tables on the fly!

JGoodies produces an awesome tool for finding dead files that are eating up hard drive space.

Azureas is a BitTorrent client that works far better than even the Shadow client. (Anyone remember how Furi rocked the house before LimeWire muscled in?)

JBoss is an example of a J2EE server. If you don't know what that is, it's probably because you're not a web developer. J2EE technologies are running the high end web applications of today, both the visible and invisible ones.

Think Free is a great little Microsoft Office replacement in Java. (Sadly they haven't seem to have changed much since their initial release, but it's still good stuff.)

So on and so forth. Of course, if you want a little fun, go check out a few Java games like Wurm Online.