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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.
What does Sun know about games?
First off,
"There are a lot of misconceptions about Java," explains Melissinos, "one is that it's too slow".
Ok, let's suppose for a minute that Java is _not_ slow and that this guy's correct. Then we see the following:
Game developers would say, 'You'll never get C code to run as fast as Assembly, you'll never do it.' Well it happened. When C++ came out, the same thing occurred, and once again C++ became the development standard. The same thing holds true today, folks are saying there is no way Java is as fast as C++. Well I'm here to show you it can and it can even run faster."
I find it impossible to believe that a bytecode program, which runs on top of a VM (written, by the way, in C++ or in an equivalent imperative language) could be faster than C++ unless the programmer is absolutely clueless. But I'll even be satisfied with "only 50% slower" if I see an example.
What I won't take is reading the previous two and the following in the same damn article:
"Developers are saying that it's so much easier to code in Java than in C++," says Melissinos, "and there is less to worry about as well. The Java code actually takes care of problems like garbage collection and memory issues that C++ doesn't. In C++ you have to do all that manually and Java does it automatically saving so much time in development."
So we basically have this guy saying that Java can be faster than C++, which can be as fast as assembly and still admitting that Java uses garbage collection (an inherently slow task). He's either so passionate about Java that he doesn't realise what he's saying or he's been spending too much time with the people in marketing.
That the article posted before this one is the most outrageous vendor lie ever told? *grin*
"Write once, run anywhere (maybe)"
Steve
..don't panic
I don't know that idiots shouldn't be considered citizens, but i do know they shouldn't be considered for president. I wonder what George Jr's stand on this is. I guess he'll have to call his father to find out.
First of all Java is a bullshit language, and yes you could call me a troll. Since it was designed for specific purpose and model, it is difficult trying to force a model onto another paradigm: Games.
Read what Mr. Sweeney(Unreal.com) has said in past interviews about Java. Java code is just not the type of application you can write games with. I mean, games push billions of bits across your bus and having such a high overhead like java, means you have to settle for games like "Yahoo Pool!". From my experience, using Java for UIs are horrible(u get inconsistent response times from simple things like menus). Now try imagining that for games.
While I have to agree that Java has some advantages (in my case it eases remote administration of custom developed hardware/software). But please don't advocate Java is the Holy Grail of computing.
I've seen the same bullshit for C++ on some forums, where ppl just spurt out, "Use C++". I've seen comments where one guy just glanced at the Quake2 source code overnite and complained it lacked any "software engineering" techniques or C++.
What happened to the days when ppl were more pragmatic?
That java will ever be used for games. Its not fast enough. IT never will be fast enough for a game machine.
Game makers code in Assembly, directly to the hardware to get extra speed, and the rest of their code is in C.
Tecmo and AM2 both write their games completely in assembly and thats why their games are as good looking as they are and push the hardware like they do.
Java development? is it a Joke? Only lazy American PC developers would use Java.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac