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Project Darkstar C Client

Sun’s Project Darkstar team has released a new C client for their Java game server. This is a great starting point for those wanting to use Darkstar, but need the client to be in another language. If you download the client archive, cClient9.6, make sure to add the .tar.gz extension to it. It was posted in the Darkstar forum with no file extension. Being on Windows, I assumed it was a zip file, but after tagging it thus and opening it with 7zip, I see it’s most likely a gzipped tar (the tar has no extension either).

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2008 06 10 gdmike Game Tools
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Java Doodles

If you still aren’t up to speed on the improvements coming down in Java 6 update 10, or even if you are, you’ll want to check out Joshua Marinacci’s blog. He’s starting a new series, titled ‘Java Doodles’, which highlights the new stuff. The first post in the series covers the new crossdomain.xml support, which allows an applet to connect with servers other than the one from which it was downloaded without popping up a security warning. This is just one of several new features that make Java applets what they always wanted to be.

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2008 05 29 gdmike Java Comments (0) Permalink

JMonkey Engine 2.0 SVN

More news on the Java game dev front. The JMonkeyEngine hit 1.0 in October of last year. Since the project started, the source has been hosted at java.net in CVS. Over the past few months, work has been going on behind the scenes on JME 2.0. Just the other day, JME developer Joshua Slack announced on his blog that the source for 2.0 is now in SVN at Google Code. You can read about some of the enhancements and new features in that post.

It’s always a natural instinct to be wary of a project in pre-beta state for anything other than experimentation. In this case, though, the source for 2.0 is being used as the base for the project Joshua is working on at NCSoft. The upside of that is that it’s fairly stable in its current state.

Now if I can only find the time to play around with it.

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2008 04 30 gdmike Game Tools
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LWJGL 2.0 Applets in Action

Now that LWJGL 2.0 beta 1 is out in the wild, there are a couple of applets demonstrating the new feature of embedding a game in an applet using the native LWJGL Display rather than an AWT component. There are some wrinkles to iron out yet. For example, running the applet a second time in the same browser session will cause it to hang for some people. But at least now, LWJGL applets are much more usable for production work than in previous versions.

If you’re interested in checking it out, you can try out the demo applet (and if you’re a kind soul, report any feedback you have about it over in this thread at JGO). Check out how smoothly you can transition from running in the browser to running in full screen and back. For something a little different, give the latest game prototype from Kevin Glass a try. He’s updated it to use the new LWJGL applet stuff. Both applets use his Slick library, which is another great tool for Java game developers.

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2008 04 24 gdmike Game Tools
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LWJGL 2.0 Beta 1

The Lightweight Java Game Library team have announced the first beta release of LWJGL 2.0. Here’s the list of changes as posted in the announcement:

LWJGL 2.0 changes
Major changes
* fmod and devil removed
* dropped support for windows 9x
* glu moved to lwjgl_util
* glu now uses buffers instead of arrays
* New Display.setParent() feature allows you to embed the Display into an existing AWT canvas.
For example, this allows for an existing LWJGL based application to be used in an applet without porting to AWTGLCanvas.
This means the death of AWTInputAdapter
* Mac OS X: Added support for x86_64
* Linux: Using openal-soft instead of the creative (was more or less broken anyway)
* Support for lzma and pack200 in appletloader

Minor changes
* no more processMessages at isCloseRequested, isVisible, isDirty and isActive
* Removed 2D OpenGL initialization code from Display. It messes with the implicit, but well-defined, opengl default state and doesn’t fit well with multiple context types (gl3 and d3d)
* NV_conditional_render extension added
* Lots of input/focus fixes

The Display.setParent() feature looks interesting to me. Not only will it make it easier to convert LWJGL apps to applets, I can also see the potential for embedding an app in a Swing-based editor, or Netbeans plugin.

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2008 04 22 gdmike Game Tools
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