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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Java Technology Demo Showcases Quake 48

Posted by simoniker from the earth-shaking-or-cereally-boring? dept.
solarisguy writes "I saw earlier today on JavaGaming.org that Reality Interactive released a non-playable demo of Quake in Windows or Linux flavors, implemented entirely in Java. It runs natively on Linux, 1280x1024 at 60fps on my box with around 65% cpu. Could this be the future of games on Linux?" This ties in neatly to our recent posting on Sun promoting Java for higher-end games development.
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Java Technology Demo Showcases Quake More

Java Technology Demo Showcases Quake

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  • Seven year-old games that you can watch but not even play? If that's the future, thanks but no thanks.

  • Quake is GPL. Where is the source? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:49PM (#6157112) Journal
    The Quake engine is GPLed. I imagine they ported it to Java for this 'technology demo' .. So what I want to know is, where is the source?

    -molo

  • Big Deal... (Score:3, Informative)

    by stoborrobots ( 577882 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @09:17PM (#6157293)
    This was done long ago...

    Remember this??? [passagen.se]

    This demo is offline these days, but the info is all still up there.

    • Oh my god, I remember this... I actually had a server setup off my dial up connection years ago, and actually had some friends connect to it. I had the client hosted on my webspace. I wish I still had a copy of it.

      It makes me sad knowing that game went off the deep end and disappeared...

  • Can anyone setup a mirror? This is stopping and starting at a couple K a second.. and that Fileplanet thing is bogus.. you gotta become a member in order to download? Where is sunsite when you need it?

  • *Shrug* (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @09:46PM (#6157448) Homepage Journal
    "Could this be the future of games on Linux?"

    Depends. Can Java talk to 3D cards? If not, then the answer is no.

    If Java were to develop a cross platform version of DirectX, then the answer would be eventually yes. I'm not just talking 3D here, so spare me the "OpenGL already exists" rebuttals. That's only one piece of the puzzle. There also needs to be the equivalent of DirectSound, DirectPlay, and another Direct component that I'm having difficulty remembering of right now.

    That's a really ambitious task. But, on the other hand, it'd be really hard to want to develop using DirectX if the Java equivalent does the job and requires little to no porting in order to support other platforms such as Linux or even Mac.

    • Re:*Shrug* (Score:3, Informative)

      by FrenZon ( 65408 ) *
      Depends. Can Java talk to 3D cards? If not, then the answer is no.
      Java3D supports hardware accelerated OpenGL and/or DirectX (the user decides by installing one of two Java3D runtimes)

    • Re:*Shrug* (Score:2, Insightful)

      by solarisguy ( 59280 )
      If you look, it's using OpenGL and the associated 3D drivers with it. There's nothing that prevents it from using 100% of the driver optimizations and hardware acceleration that is available to OpenGL.

    • Re:*Shrug* (Score:3, Informative)

      by Christ-on-a-bike ( 447560 )
      http://jsdl.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

      SDL does sound and event handling pretty well, with Java bindings here. Other posters have mentioned OpenGL too. As for networking like 'directplay' (I think), does any game on windows actually use it? I would have thought just programming sockets would be fairly cross-platform. I think SDL_net can help with that too.

      • " As for networking like 'directplay' (I think)"

        I was referring to Joysticks, mice, kb's, etc. I may not have gotten the right terminology for MS's product in that area, though...
      • GL4Java [jausoft.com] lets you use OpenGL from Java. It's LGPLed. There's an entry for "How does GL4Java compare to Java3D? [sourceforge.net]" in the FAQ.

      • Ever try playing a game multiplayer with friends, and discover you can't, because it can't cope with NAT, or because despite you opening the ports the game tells you to, it seems to want more undocumented ones, or because you bought your copy for Linux and theirs is on Windows and despite being the exact same game at the same patchlevel (i.e. Loki titles), they just won't talk to each other?

        If stuff just doesn't work... it's probably using DirectPlay.

        Not that I'm bitter or anything. Just that stuff I know

    • Re:*Shrug* (Score:3, Funny)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
      There also needs to be the equivalent of DirectSound, DirectPlay, and another Direct component that I'm having difficulty remembering of right now.

      Maybe it's the sixth beer, but I think that other component is "Direct-suck-my-balls". I know I'd pay for it...

  • Dancing Bear (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @10:11PM (#6157638)
    When you see a dancing bear, you don't evaluate how well it dances, you marvel that it dances at all.

    I suppose next we'll be asked if scooters are the future of personal transportation, or talentless teen-age models are the future of pop music, or invading countries that have oil is the future of world commerce. (Oops!)

  • This is news, how? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mensa Babe ( 675349 )

    solarisguy writes "I saw earlier today on JavaGaming.org that Reality Interactive released a non-playable demo of Quake in Windows or Linux flavors, implemented entirely in Java. (...)"

    I have lots of non-playable games in Linux flavors, implemented entirely in win32 API... Of course, I am joking. This is great news. When most of games in stores start to be written in Java, I am sure many GNU users will use them (at least those, who have no moral objections to use proprietary software) and there will b

  • Several titles that have already been released or are about to be released seriously considered using Java instead of the usual C++. They all decided in the end that they would stick with what they knew for fear the performance would not be enough. (I cannot for the life of me remember the titles since this was a while ago, but I was reading developer's comments) Not as far off as you think, especially if sun has a proof of concept game like quake showing good performance.
  • I'm meant to be amazed at a 7 year old game that runs significantly slower (read 7 times on my machine) than the native code that has native machine coded libraries? Who are they trying to kid?

    I'm all for java and its portability (hell Iâ(TM)ve been force fed it for the last 3 years at University & work), but the promised speed increases and the dynamic optimizations with the vm seem to be a long way away (can anyone say vaporcrap).
    • "They" are not trying to kid anyone. As stated on the website, "we" are attempting to show that gaming with reasonable performance is possible with Java. I believe that we are doing just that.

      I would be very interested for you to back up your 7x claim. What metrics are you using for the comparison especially since the preview is NOT Quake?

      And let's talk about the native machine coded libraries. What's your beef? (Check out my post to "Not "Implemented entirely in Java" before you reply.)

      DISCLAIMER:
  • I just get "JVM terminated abnormally" when I try to run it via the launcher. If I run it directly I get:

    An unexpected exception has been detected in native code outside the VM. Unexpected Signal : EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION occurred at PC=0x0 Function=[Unknown.] Library=(N/A) NOTE: We are unable to locate the function name symbol for the error just occurred. Please refer to release documentation for possible reason and solutions. Current Java thread: at org.lwjgl.opengl.CoreGL.active
  • ...is not even mentioned. The thing that made early Quake suck was that servers could be ping flooded and the game would die.

    That and Id never addressed hacking issues that ruined the game. Oh wait, this aspect about quake hasn't changed at all. Never mind.

    Dolemite
    _______________

  • It may be mostly written in Java, but it's calling a buttload of native code to do the actual work. Don't believe me? Disable native methods in your VM and see how far it gets.

    So let's try to keep the hype under perspective. What we really have here is a demonstration that Java is fast enough to handle the game logic, and maybe the 3D calculations, of a 3D game that isn't playable, all at a fraction of the speed of Objective-C. Oh, I'm so impressed.
    • This is a very interesting post but I'm glad that you brought up a VERY common misconception. How do you think that Java reads from files or from the network or displays to the screen? It's all JNI (i.e. native methods). There's a reason that there's about 5MB of .dll / .so files in the JRE. So take most any "100% Java" application and turn off native methods and see how far you get.

      As for the playable perspective, the only difference between this implementation and a playable implemenation is that in
  • In order for gaming companies to be willing to write their top of the line games in Java, they'd have to trust Sun to keep Java on the bleeding edge of performance. Since Sun gives away Java free, I don't know if they have the resources to do that.

    Maybe Sun could sell certain libraries to those companies to offset the cost?
    • It's great that you bring this up. There ARE other vendors with JVM's. For exmaple, IBM. IBM's JVM 1.3.X is considerably (~30%) faster than the Sun JVM.

      As for Sun and Java (and I mean to start no flame wars here), it seems that IBM is doing just as much, or even more for the community (with Jikes and Eclipse for just a start) than Sun is.

      IBM -- where's the 1.4.2 for Windows!!!!!
  • ive never seen a simple gui app written in java that could run 60fps on any machine!

    somehow i have my doubts...

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