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Sun Pushes Java For Games Market
mysterious_mark writes "Sun has a new initiative promoting Java for game development, according to a story at CNET News." Interestingly, the company is trying to convince game makers that you can make state-of-the-art titles in Java as easily as simpler browser or phone games: "Java also has been used to build a number of simple online PC games, such as card games, but the language can be used to create sophisticated graphics for A-list games, Melissinos said. 'Some people may have the misconception that Java can't do great, high-performance graphics, and that's absolutely not true.'"
Although I think that it remains a very long way off before ID will be developing the 'next big 3d thing' (tm) in Java, there is perhaps room on the server side end of things, particularly as MMORPGs start to garner more attention.
...) You can purchase or download an Open Source Application Server which will give you things like clustering and failover for free (meaning that you can leverage of this system to provide multiple 'shards' or servers or such things for your game).
No matter what the marketeers at Sun tell you, Java will never perform as well as C/C++ and when it comes to creating realtime 3d environments, every bit of speed is crucial. That said, Java has some pretty extensive graphics APIs and hooks into OpenGL and DirectX, which can be useful. For games that are not graphics intensive (and they do exist), Java may well be useful, particularly as you get all sorts of libraries and memory management for free. With JDK 1.4, Java is actually pretty fast on the client-side these days, you mat be pleasantly surprised if your experience is with older versions of Java. Coupled with modern processors (gHz!!) you can end up with a pretty responsive system. But client-side Java was never my cup of tea and it is still not even close to your C++ 3d engine.
However, many modern games are moving online, and the possiblities of Java are much better here. MMORPGs are interesting because you connect graphical clients with servers. The servers are essentially gigantic rule engines and state machines - client input is taken, processed, perhaps things are stored in databases (this is essentially what you do when you save your character) - . The system may have to integrate with payment engines and credit card processing facilities provided by third parties. None of this stuff is graphical at all, it is all about pure data processing and distributed computing.
Funnily enough, this architectural model actually coincides with what the Java people call 'Enterprise Applications' and there are incredible facilities in Java to implement this type of application. And the thing is, raw system performance is only part of the story in this type of application, scalability is perhaps more important (the ability to serve a large volume of clients), amny of the limitations of such systems are actually the I/O level of the application, trasmitting through sockets, writing to disk, communicating with the RDBMS. There are also server-specific implementations of the Java Hotspot JIT compiler, with optimisations for the particular tasks required of server applications and the best thing about this is that as the application runs it gets more and more optimised (and as the server is designed to run indefinitely
DISCLAIMER:
I am a server-side Java programmer with a loathing of swing, so I amy be a bit biased.
technoshamanic resistance within hyper-transgressive ontology
Java has already caught on as the dominant format for making games for mobile phones, but the language has yet to be widely used for PC-based games.
Not so. Mobile games are still an evolving area, and J2ME is already dying out in favour of C++ SDK's for specific platforms. The limited kind of games that J2ME has given us are not products that people are willing to pay for.
This is because *real* games need platform specific assets. Sounds that match the sound playback hardware, graphics at the right sizes and colour depths, models with the right LOD for the renderer etc.
Once you're providing a platform specific set of assets, there's very little benefit in having platform independant code. Mobiles don't have alot of CPU or RAM, and if you're not going to have platform portability anyway, then there's really no point in using Java. You're much better off programming on the metal. Native phones like the SPV and the N-Gage already allow this, and offer C++ SDK's, which mobile game developers are using.
SDK's like this are not available on phones without operating systems (because they don't have memory protection so you can't let 3rd party executables onto them, an issue neatly side-stepped by J2ME). However this problem will be overcome by implementations like BREW or by just adding memory protection. It just a matter of time.
Having said all that, I now write PC games and I think that Java could have a bright future there. Not in games written entirely in Java, but with Hybrid games. Java will never compete for speed. It's a fact, live with it. But 90% of a games' CPU time is spent curring around 20% of the games' code (i.e. the renderer, routefinder etc.). If that 20% is written in C/C++/asm and some percentage (large)of the rest in Java, the speed issue will of little consequence.
The real question here is why? C++ works very well thank you and the tools and API's required to create a hybrid game such as this are a real pain (when compared to just hitting F7 in VC++). No kind of marketing speak from Sun is going to make programmers go through that pain, just for the sake of 'using Java'. If the tool's were better and Sun put alot of effort into supporting this kind of deployment then game developers might well take it up. Not for platform independance, but for memory managment and the other *real* benefits of Java (simplified inheiretance, useful RTTI, serialisation etc.). That's were Java can be useful and that's what Sun should be talking about.
Also, if you really want game developers to use your technology, it's got to work on X-Box and PS/2. FACT. So get to it Sun, you've got plenty to sort out before you start nagging us with your marketing hounds.