Platform Independent Gaming?

klocwerk writes "At the game developers conference, Sun is releasing a white paper on their new "Java Games Profile." Their ultimate goal? To have one CD you could pop into an Xbox, a PS2, a Windows machine, or a Linux machine, and play the same game on them all. If they get full support for it I can finally get rid of that windows gaming partition!" Sun's got an article on their site describing what they hope to accomplish.

Comments

Re:Why bother?

[spectecjr]

Um, have you looked that full screen mode support in JDK 1.4? Faster than C++, my man.
Check it out.

BULL SHIT.

If for no other reaso than because memory pooling is a bitch on Java.

Tell ya what... why not crawl back into your hole you Sun Astroturfer?

Re:This can only work for some games

[Pussy Is Money]

The more advanced the "on-the-fly" technology, the more unpredictable delays you introduce, the longer your startup times become, and the more memory you use. It's wrong to think that better hardware will absorb those costs because it's not true.

Re:Why bother?

[spectecjr]

"LD HL,0" is not the same as "33,0".

If they were the SAME you would not need an assembler.

Arguing that assembly language and machine code are the same is like arguing that English and French are the "same", since you can translate one into the other, often with a 1-1 mapping of words (the analogy fails slightly, since there isn't always a 1-1 mapping, but generally a word in one language will map directly to a word in the other).

If one form requires translation (human or machine) to be put into the other form, the two forms are not the same. That is all.

Assembly and Machine Code are equivalent.

Higher-level languages are not.

For example:

typedef struct tagData {
int data1;
char data2;
} TAGDATA;

void DoSomething (TAGDATA* a) {
a + 1;
*a.data = 1;
}
----------------

This cannot be expressed directly (typically) in assembly language or machine code, with a 1:1 mapping of constructs.

Why am I bothering? It's quite clear that you're arguing semantics here, when the fact is that they ARE equivalent, and generate IDENTICAL results. So what if you have to put assembly language through a translator? Machine code typically has to go through translation too (or are you forgetting microcode?). The only difference being that in one case you're doing it in your head, and in the other you're getting something else to do the grunt work for you.

It's like saying that there's a difference between pins on an IC and the labels you give those pins, because the pins themselves are the lowest level data.

Well, sure, but you try putting data through the voltage rails and see how far you get. You're constrained by the design of the system. Assembly language is an expression of that design.

Next thing you're going to say is that ASCII is less efficient than binary, because binary can represent any number, but ASCII only represents the codes that have been assigned to it.

Simon

Re:More information here...

[ImaLamer]

-1 redundant yet I was the first to post this, odd.