Hi Everybody,
I'm a Programmer in a team who's planning to develop an Applet which is an MMORPG game in real time with medium graphics(so it could consume as less RAM as possible at runtime).
Our first attempt was a 2D Engine built with the most basic classes in Java(Graphics2D and such), we've built a Server program in .NET using C# and designed a protocol in which the java applet would communicate with (Server->Channel->Player based on TCP), all went well until we've implemented in-game stuff like Gear and such, when 2 players would be at the same map at the same time it would just throw an out of memory exception because of the 64MB max RAM usage limit(too many animations and pictures needing to be loaded to the ram at the same time) to applets.
Instead of trying to make the engine more efficient(there's a limit to what a person can do in such matters), we decided to go for 3d(a low poly 3d model would take less ram even with the 2D textures than 400 small bitmaps that create a fully animated pixel-art character which is 5MB~ and the gear is another 5MB~ for each item, which can't be reused since its unique for each character at runtime).
I started 3d programming about half a year ago and spent a lot of time learning Java3D which is kind of a dead technology, I didn't really know if there was anything else i could use to program a 3d game in Java, and looked for a Scene Management API since i didn't like the idea of creating an efficient Scene Graph system myself, using JOGL.
Getting to advanced stuff in Java3D (like support in Skeletal animations) was hard enough, and seeing that there is barely any support for that kind of features I've decided to Google for related 3D Scene Management APIs.
Eventually I found this site and this Engine and decided to go for it.
my initial response to the Web Start Examples(mainly the one with the sea in it) was being Shocked by the level of this Engine, It is truly Amazing and I'm grateful that such a thing for Java Exist.
I just started doing the Tutorials(Flag rush) and i would like to say a couple of words, if I may.
First of all, this engine is amazing, 180~ lines of code and i made a Random Terrain with a Textured-by-height blended Bitmap.
Its so similar to Java3D yet it is SO much more simple than that.
The only thing I'm currently lacking is a book(the tutorials are amazing, yet a book would be great for such an amazing Engine).
Another thing i would like to know is, how efficient is jME as a tool to build games based on the Applet technology, how much ram space does the basic Initialization of the Engine use?(i guess i could find out myself with experimenting but i would like an opinion from professionals)
Thanks in advance, and i hope i can fit in this community,
~MythoS(){}
MythoS said:
The only thing I'm currently lacking is a book(the tutorials are amazing, yet a book would be great for such an amazing Engine).
That's been talked about here and there: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/forum/index.php?topic=4991
As it'll say in the thread, it's tough to nail a book to such an evolving engine... Workarounds required today may not be needed tomorrow, new features might be added, etc. The closest thing to a book would be our collaborative book! I'm talking about the wiki ;)
Another thing i would like to know is, how efficient is jME as a tool to build games based on the Applet technology, how much ram space does the basic Initialization of the Engine use?(i guess i could find out myself with experimenting but i would like an opinion from professionals)
It really depends on the level of game you're building... As you mentioned earlier, building a lower requirement game will mean less resources needed.. No change here. As for the Java WebStart functionality, that's very light on resources.. applets can be another story.
Thanks in advance, and i hope i can fit in this community
and we hope you enjoy your stay :D
I think the newer kind of applets (since Java 6 Update 10) can act just like webstart applications and don't have those limitations any more.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/6u10.html
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/6u10/plugin2/jnlp/index.html
Core-Dump said:
I think the newer kind of applets (since Java 6 Update 10) can act just like webstart applications and don't have those limitations any more.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/6u10.html
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/6u10/plugin2/jnlp/index.html
Nice!
I was well aware about the JNLP in Applet tag since i've used it myself using java3d(otherwise end user would need to install java3d libs) but i didn't know that you can maximize heap size.
Thanks, that's great.