So at first, I wanted to create an applet, but alas, the memory limits are too small. So the best approach I find, without having to write every "extra screen" is a hybrid.
Things that I associate with extra include the following:
Login screen
Game Finder Window (with refreshing / game listing with details / Game selecting / and game joining )
etc … anything that's not the actual game itself.
My questions are this.
can I load images etc in the app, over the net. i.e. as a URL like "http://… .jpg" BUT, that caches it. So if the file didn't change, it uses the cached copy instead. If I have to program this, then the answer is no. I imagine that an applet could because it should be using the browser's resources if I'm right.
can I pass parameters to a web start application? that way I can bypass most of the things that I'd have to code such as a login screen and game finder window.
would there be things such as game finder windows / server lists already created out there as a library i can drop in?
You could do it in two stages, have a login/server browser applet, that launches the real application with the appropriate parameters.
Edit: Err, you can probably not launch a desktop application from an applet. Not sure about webstart, though, no experience using them. How much does your memory requirements exceed those of an applet? Could you split the application in two applets?
it's a game with lots of graphical images. The images being the big thing here. I could attempt to get away with trying 96 megs. but the default with the application (pre applet) had a memory error so i just boosted it to whatever… i probably should test to see how much it actually needed.
That's exactly what i do, and it works perfectly.
the jnlp file is for the native libs and you can simply specify the amount of memory even without linking to a jnlp writing this:
<PARAM name="java_arguments" value="-Xmx128m">
128 being the amount of ram you'd like your applet to be able to use.
inside the Applet tag.
I'm guessing jnlp is the route I'm going to take. I've tried it before, but found the signing rather annoying. It might not be so hard if I keep the resources (models, graphics) outside of the application and called over the net. But I have to do some testing first to see if it can cache the files instead of retrieving it each time.