Slashdot Mirror
Quake2 Engine In Java
An anonymous reader writes "Ok, so the game is old and there was a really poor web version some years back, but some guys at Bytonic Software in Germany have done a full source port of the Quake2 engine from C to Java. It's cross platform, performs just about as fast as C and has room for further improvements according to the developer. Also, there was another game engine that ran Q3 maps that was shown recently at JavaOne. Are first generation Java games that far behind?"
Maybe this will lay waste to claims that java is slow, bloated, and sucks.
I've only recently started doing heaving Java programming, and I have to say that the language is a dream to code with (provided you use a decent IDE). There're so many classes in place already, there's nothing you can't do. I'll take it over C++ any day, and MS's MFC is horrible on comparison.
My only problem with it is the deployment; screwing with class paths and what not.
People need to realize that most of the overhead they experience with their "hello world" experience has to do with loading the classes in the beginning. Once that is done, Java performs nicely.
Sure, straight C is faster, but Java isn't the turtle everyone makes it out to be.
First released notice in May.
:-)
This is a good demo of the power of Java, it handles the game, then passes this smoothly to the native opengl rendering. Jogl is great, I hope I can find time to work with it some more.
Those crazy Germans do deserve some awesome credit for this! (having lived in Germany I can say I love Germans, and they are crazy!
Sourceforge page
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It's ported to Managed C++ a year ago.
Now you can have the eye candy of Quake 2 with the speed of Doom 3!
I don't care if it's running in Java C D E or bloody Z, as long as the game runs well and looks playable (AKA not shooting green blocks to make red blocks appear with a black block and various brownish walls. ).
No gamers is going to go "Doom 3 running on Java!? I'm so not buying that!" or "Doom 3 is running only on C++ I'm not playing that!". No one but the coders themselvs and the modders will truely care what it's written in as long as it runs okay and looks good.
So gonna get modded Troll..
I like muppets.
Having worked with Java, I'd say a powerful IDE like Eclipse is a requirement.
Lots of people were writing Java code long before Eclipse was released. A random text editor (Textpad) interfacing with Java1.1 was sufficient to write and compile a lot of early java code. I think that the JRE was setup so nicely that its integration into IDE's is/was so easy that everyone writing Java is now using an interactive IDE. Its not that the language requires one, its just that thats how programming is done nowadays.
I will admit that I didn't dig into the code, but it seems that jake uses jogl and joal for the graphics and sounds rendering.
Now, just following the links to these 2 libraries teaches me that they are mere bindings to C libraries (or I am mistaken, like I said , I didn't dig into the code).
I guess that the pure java part does more than just delegating everything to some C engine, but claiming that Java gaming has come to age seems a bit premature, given that it relies on C for its meaty parts...
Not to mention the fact that I kinda doubt the port is being played on the same hardware that the original was played on at the time.
It had BETTER perform as good on todays hardware, and that I kinda doubt...though I haven't tried yet.
No Comment.
He wasn't stating required use of an IDE to develop Java in, he was questioning the grandparent posters statement that Java 'is a dream to code with (provided you use a decent IDE)'
No Comment.
No, it doesn't run on a Mac. Their site claims only win2k/XP and linux compatibility, so it won't even run on win9x like the original.
Why did they write this in java if not to make it cross platform?
Why write anything in java, if not to make it cross platform?
but what about when Quake2 came out? The code runs at about 60% performance on today's machines. So when Quake2 was released, Quake2 Java would have broken my machine, as it barely ran the orignal Quake2 version. Java can offer portability over platforms but games often push hardware to its limits and so may raise the bar on minimum system specs.
Currently supported operating systems are Linux and Windows2000/XP.
Doesnt the fact that only windows and linux are supported sort of defeat the object of doing it in Java?
Have you actually tried it though? I did this morning and it's TERRIBLY slow.
I ran it here and there was no noticable speed difference and a little benchmarking only showed it to be marginally slower -- although perhaps there would be a bigger difference on slow hardware. One thing I did notice though was that it was a bit buggy, this ranged from a few small anoyances like mouse2 and mouse3 being mixed up in the preferences so my old config file had to be edited to the fact that it always crashed on exit forcing me to do a 'killall -9 java' which makes you doubt the common assertion that Java code is less buggy than C code (of course this hasn't had the level of testing that Quake 2 had nor has it been developed by the likes of Carmack).
The important thing to know is that the majority of your performance gains are obtained by scheduling the hardware intelligently, keeping the CPU and GPU well balanced, i.e. busy at all times. And of course, that your tight loops are really optimized, that you do not fragment memory, etc. That, for the most part, has nothing to do with the language your using, but simply with your programming skills.
By the way, what hardware have they tested on to claim that performance is similar? If it's modern hardware, then of course it will run at 60+ fps no matter what.
What's more, I would guess the bulk of the work on the CPU for quake2 consisted in traversing the BSP tree, building the scene (with transforms still being performed on the CPU at that time) and collision detection. The rest is taken care by the graphics hardware so that's totally independant of the language you've used.
There is one thing that bothers me with Java though. You never know when the garbage collection will be performed. Sure, recent virtual machines make it possible to perform garbage collection in smaller but more frequent iterations so you don't halt the system for a few seconds like early virtual machines would do. But still, if you're in a tight loop with your data and instruction cache perfectly populated, and all of a sudden the garbage collection kicks in, then your cache is toast and data will have to be refetched to it when execution resumes. That would result in a horrible performance loss provided you are already really close to the machine's limit. Also, what I'm saying is only pertinent on a console with no (or almost no) OS, because on any PC operating system, your process can be interrupted at any time by the various system tasks that are running, so the garbage collection interrupting your tight loop would only be one of many possible interruptions.
I don't believe java can be as fast as native code, although probably extremely close. And sure, a good java compiler will generate faster code then a crappy C++ compiler.
Another thing I don't like about java is that you have no control over memory (not that i know of, maybe some recent VM extensions allow you to have some control over that?). I really like to be able to give different sets of alloc/dealloc routines to the different subsystems in a game. A subsystem that is known to perform very small allocations/deallocations very often could be passed alloc/free routines that are customized to its use so that memory fragmentation is kept to a minimum. If such a component was allowed to get memory from the same pool then your other subsystems, it would wreck havoc on your memory.
Anyway, it's not such a good idea to compare java and C++ (or whatever other languages) on a system where resources are abundant (PCs).
By the way, Jak & Daxter for the ps2 is written in a lisp derived language (GOAL), yet that game outperforms and looks better then almost everything else on the ps2. Yet lisp is not perceived as a high performance language. But the people at Naughty Dog have developed their very own compiler that is extremely specific to their needs (see their gamasutra post-mortem, very cool read) So, it goes to show that the notion of performance shouldn't be tied with a language, but rather with that language's runtime & compilers.
Ok enough ranting!
Now I haven't used java since 2000, but have they fixed the seemingly random garbage collection? I remember seeing a raytraced wolfy3d java demo years back, and garbage collection would make it go to a stand still at random intervals.
when Push Comes to Shove
No, that is Logo.
Lasers Controlled Games!
A brief snippit from the developer site:
Ummm. What are all those Windows .dlls and Linux .so's doing in the distrib? I'm assuming they're for the graphics stuff... It seems you could probably get JavaScript to manage the game play if you offloaded all the heavy graphics lifting to compiled native libraries like this seems to do.
-Russ
Me
The summary says "Runs almost as fast as the original code!"
The article says "Runs somewhere between 60 and 85% of the speed of the original", and this is on modern hardware.
Let's see how it performs on hardware that was actually used to play Quake 2 before we start lying about how fast java is compared to the native code. When the hardware in question is capable of pulling 300 frames per second, it's pretty damn likely it's not even being used to its full potential. Even the K6-2 machine was getting near 60fps. The only people who got 60fps in Quake 2 when it came out were the people with monster machines.
Sorta. There are numerous games out already that are based on Java. Pretty much all of Popcap uses Java. Java is also used as a scripting language for several games (sorry, no links), as an alternative to Python, Lisp, C++, Lua or any other interpretive language (or home-brewed language).
However, it will be a very long time (if ever) before developers switch over to Java as their language of choice. Why? Because it is only the last generation or two of games that have started to use C++.
Game developers are constantly trying to push the edges of what can be done within current hardware limitations. The problem with languages that do a lot for us is that... They do a lot for us. Which is nice a lot of times. But always seems to happen at the most inconvenient time (like when we're doing matrix operations, or animating units).
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I happen to know of at least one AAA game which used Java - it used it as a scripting engine.
Nihilistic's Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, back in 2000. As I recall, in the Gamasutra postmortem, they commented on how well it worked out for them.
Sadly, I don't know what JVM they were using - but they did say in the postmortem that they didn't write it themselves.
VB is not a programming language, but a development tool that includes some sort of Basic language, in a similar way that Delphi includes Pascal.
Why doesn't Jake2.0 support Mac OS?
The original c/c++ source compiles and runs on several platforms. THAT SOUNDS PRETTY PORTABLE TO ME.
So why are we using Java to write games?
Its not more portable as I've just pointed out.
Its slower.
And I'm a grown up, so I can *decide* if I want to use pointers, gotos, or multiple inhieritance.
If you don't like these features in C++ THEN DONT USE THEM.
A language is *not* better or easier if it leaves useful features out!
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
Congratulations; you just posted the most utterly obvious comment I have ever read on Slashdot.
Please go hang yourself.
Tr3B (Robert Beckebans IIRC) has written a Q2 clone
in Python some time ago, and currently hacks on
qrazor-fx aka http://xreal.sf.net/ which is a Q2
with graphics quality in the range of Q3 or even
Doom 3.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
The first commercial Java game was Tom Clancy's Politika, published in 1997. This was followed by Tom Clancy's Ruthless.com in 1998, and Shadow Watch in 1999. I'm not exactly sure what the comment above means, but personally I consider those games first generation. They were burnt onto CD and sold in stores like many a C or C++ title.
Whereas some C/C++ games have used Java as a scripting language, the approach of these games was to use Java for the core game loop and game logic, and to write new native libraries for the performance heavy stuff like graphics and sound. For Politika, we wrote our own movie and sound code (for both PC and Mac) because Java didn't have very good support at that point. We almost got some faster and leaner 2D graphics support in there too, but ran out of time. This approach was written up for a paper (Writing Java Games: How We Did It), which was presented at CGDC 1998.
In Ruthless.com, the native libraries were improved and the 2D graphics support was added. Basically a wrapper was created around DirectX using JNI. In addition, the whole game was compiled to native code instead of using the Java VM. This whole system hit its peak with Shadow Watch, which is an awesome little turn-based strategy game; think Rainbow Six Tactics.
So this has been possible for many years -- it's just that nobody's carried it on. The big accomplishment here is that they may be using only Sun libraries, which only means that Sun has finally gotten their act together and put out well-optimized code.
the benchmarks show, that the performance on Linux is not as good as on Windows. I wonder if this comes from the worser nvidia driver or because java performs not as good (is less optimized?) (compiler???) on linux.
Can anyone explain what the shared libraries and dlls in the compiled distribution are for? Is the Quake 2 part of the code 100% java, and are the shared libs just wrappers around the OpenGL libraries, or what?
If so, why does there have to be a wrapper shared library created to interface with the opengl libraries?
>Jake2 uses jogl for OpenGL graphics and joal for 3D
...erm...more like sticking a 302 in a Ford Pinto and still calling it a Pinto. Nonetheless, still an impressive port...props-n-hos to the Jake2 crew.
>sound. Currently supported operating systems are Linux
>and Windows2000/XP.
This isn't native swing and double buffered Jpanels
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Chrome is a DirectX FPS (first person shooter) based game. The Graphical engine is written in C++, but all the game logic, networking, etc... has been coded in Java, with the objetive in mind to be recoded by mod makers (the code is also included in source form). The result, starting a level takes about 1:30 minutes in a 512 MB and 1,2Ghz machine (from the byte-code).
Everyone who uses NetBeans or even Eclipse can tell you how much slower are these IDEs than KDevelop or Visual Studio: a lot. I havent seen a large desktop java app running close to a native C/C++ app. And you?. It can be shown empirically.
About languages speed, the differences between two languages are only marked by the features they implement. C++ will be ever slower than C (under same conditions) and Java will be ever slower than C++ (again under same conditions). Can Java run faster under a JVM than C++?. Possibly. Can C++ run faster than java under a C++VM?. Sure.
Then, the question is: Can interpreted code run faster than native code?.
Especially if you're writing an applet, it has a tendency to freeze for 1 or 2 seconds, and it has a tendency to freeze good chunks of the computer for 1 or 2 seconds too.
Gamers may not care what language or platform the game is running on, but they definitely DO care when the animation freezes for that long.
And for all the java zealots who think the GC freezes are gone - I'll believe it when I see it, buddy.
Have you actually had to USE JNI for ANYTHING?! It's like kicking dead whales down the beach. Fleets and fleets of dead whales.
And all you java-fanboys talk about how unstable C++ is - you haven't begun to experience the instability of calling JNI methods in an open source library, and trying to figure out - was it the java part that caused the JVM to go tits up, or was it the open source lib? You don't get one of those no-brainer stack traces, you know, you get the CPU registers, and not much else. And how in the hell, do I set breakpoints inside the JVM? Oh, and my boss wants it all done yesterday, and I'm staying late because of your WONDERFUL java platform that's supposed to solve all my problems.
Excuse me, while I quietly search for another job that does ever ever ever involve anything that has to do with java again.
Ok, so I'm a little bitter. But don't try to blow smoke up my ass, and tell me that Java and C play well together. If you're going to use java, stay in the java sandbox, or use a real language, like C++. Don't cut your own throat trying to use JNI.
is it possible to write mods for jake2 like for quake2? is the code still separated in game engine and game? it would be great to write the mods in java. as a designer its hard to learn c to create your visualizations.
It is half-compiled and half-interpreted. Java has more in common with an interpreted language than a compiled language, mainly due to the fact that it never does emit CPU code, but stops with icode, emits that, and then executes the icode in another place (the JVM). They just gussy the icode up by calling it "bytecode". Whatever.
A normal interpreter generates and executes the icode in the same place, without exposing the icode to the user.
A normal compiler goes ahead and turns the icode into CPU insns, again hiding the icode. But I'm probably far far beyond your technical level at this point. There are optimization issues with all three approaches, but you wouldn't know that.
And if you compare the memory footprint of an empty java runtime, compared with oh, say, Perl or Python, Java is a f'ing pig, both with disk and memory.
There's nothing special about java technology. You could create the same effect by using a 6502 emulator with a graphics window, and using a C compiler targeted for the 6502. Or if you don't like that CPU, pick another CPU to emulate. And you'd have a runtime memory and disk footprint way below java's.
Well, it's obvious what the bias is around here.
Java ueber alles, sieg heil!
A piece of software that has room for furhter improvements? Whatever will they think of next.
sudo ergo sum