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[MedO]

Is there a way to help you with this?

At the moment I'm not sure yet which license to use for this project. Since I'm putting quite a bit of work into this, I wanted to keep the option to try and make some money off it, and as soon as I allow other people to contribute some awkward problems will pop up. If contributions were made under a license like GPL or CC-BY-NC, I couldn't try to sell it later. Accepting contributions under a license that allows me to sell it later without sharing profit seems unfair. The only other solution is to create an agreement with all contributors about how the profits will be shared, which seems tedious considering that I'm not even sure there's any profit to be made.

Before anyone starts raging at me now, let me make one point clear: This engine will always be completely free (as in beer) and open-source for noncommercial projects. The only thing I plan is asking for a bit of money from people who want to make a profit with their game, because I feel I'd deserve some share.

That test runs slower than tf2 for me . You should definitely use OpenGL or another library for the graphics.

Please read the above discusison of the issue.

[walrusfan97]

I'm still not quite happy that we're moving over to java.

... Question: How much of our current game will be in this version? Will it be a almost direct port or are we going to see something completely different?

[StealthArcher]

I'm still not quite happy that we're moving over to java.

... Question: How much of our current game will be in this version? Will it be a almost direct port or are we going to see something completely different?

Well, if it's any consolation, I'm making a C++ engine >.>  I'm assuming that this will be done long before origin, thanks to the fact he started earlier, and is probably more experienced as a programmer in general.  We could probably pick after Origin is done, or just use this (I dunno if picking would work as most non-"in the know" people would pick mine solely off the mention of the word "java" given this topic's reactions >.>).  I don't mind the Java part anymore since they finally listened to my 34 complaints and fixed it for the W7 RC.

[MedO]

Dr. Random: I'm not working on porting GG2 right now, even though the package name of the example game might suggest otherwise .

If and when and to which engine it should be ported can be decided later, when we have at least one that's complete. And a little competition might make us both try a bit harder to deliver something worthwile.

[pach]

Doc Random, I suggest you be happy someone's working on this. I agree with Medo, competition may turn out to be good. We'll see which is better for this purpose. However, that would not make the other a waste of time, because it would be useful for other purposes.

[cspotcode]

To be honest; I was more excited for the original C++ version than I was for this. It's not that I really think that java is unusable, but to me it's a lot less accessible.

.exe Is still easier to just pick up and go. It feels somehow more complete.

... Still, a more competent engine is a more competent engine.

You should have Java installed anyway.  To me, it's just one of those things that you install, like .NET, DirectX, or the Flash plugin.  Exe only "feels" more complete because most people don't know better.  Jar is just as usable.

I would point you to Cultris, but their site seems to have disappeared.  It was a very fast, online multiplayer tetris clone that had hardware-accelerated graphics (with plenty of eye candy), was coded in Java, and was released as a single EXE (not a JAR).  So Java can be extremely accessible.

Java also has something called Java Web Start.  With JWS, you click a link on a website, hit yes on a security popup, and the program runs automatically.  I don't know if Medo wants to use JWS, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.

[Maxaxle]

The new engine could get rid of hacks/cheats, but I dunno...it seems to lag on a lot of computers, and, when added to the fact that, in a real situation, there's lots of client-client-client...-server lag, I think it could crash a few computers. On the bright side, the physics are excellent! In fact, they could even rival Source!....in 2D...

[Saniblues]

Max, the only people that can use Hacks in the GM7 format are the server hosts. Otherwise, you get a lot of stuf that doesn't sync with the server, which in turn makes whatever you did useless unless you're hosting.

[MedO]

Added parallax scrolling back- and foregrounds to the rooms. See here for some "huge robot in the sky" fun. Other notable changes

- you can now resize the window and it works properly
- control some random block with your arrow keys (don't go too far in any direction though, because the room is pretty small and your block will freeze if it leaves the room)

Next up, the camera/coordinate transform system will get a change to make it easier to draw pixel graphics exactly 1:1 (or some other integer ratio).

[gufu]

Here is the replacement for anyone who feels bored with that weird and terrible ball.


Just save the image in the resources folder.

[MedO]

Today I started to create a Character class for an example game and noticed that Box2D has some drawbacks for platformer development. Some things which are standard platformer fare are actually pretty hard to implement with it, for example: flipping or scaling shapes (To have your character look the other way), or one-sided platforms (those that you can jump through from below).

Since GG2 only uses rectangular collision boxes and doesn't support one-sided platforms either (last I know at least), this is not a problem if we want to port it, but other projects using JGang should not be forced to use that particular physics engine for simulating their entity movement. I'll change the current implementation so that JBox2D is not hardwired in (I'll continue to use it in my example though).

I'm also beginning to plan what the first release should look like. It should be possible to create simple games with it already, but networking and sound will be missing at first.

[Rodoval]

Seriously people, this test is fantastic. The phisics of this game are much more realistic than the GG2 ones, it's much more smooth, and round objects have round collision boxes .

I hope the final test is going well. I'm looking forward to this (and when I do that, I really mean it).

[MedO]

Lots of changes under the hood, but nothing new to see yet. Since the changes are mostly technical, the description below is probably unintelligable for anyone who isn't a Java programmer.

You can now use other physics engines than JBox2D (or other, simpler ways for moving your objects around). The existing JBox2D integration has been put into its own Java package as one possible option.

The XML resource files now work differently. You can now put any object into a resource file as long as its class has a Constructor that takes a DOM Element. In order for this to work, you now have to give the qualified name of every resource object's class in the .xml file.

Before:

Code: [Select]

<SimpleBox2dEntity name="box" appearance="boxImage">
<shape ref="boxShape"/>
</SimpleBox2dEntity>
Now:

Code: [Select]

<object class="de.uni_koblenz.smaxein.platonic.box2d.SimpleBox2dEntity$Factory" name="box" appearance="boxImage">
<shape ref="boxShape"/>
</object>
This is a bit more verbose, but also more flexible since tag names don't have to be mapped to resource object types anymore. It also shows a bit more clearly what's actually going on. In this example, you can see now that the described object is actually a "factory" object that can be used to create entity instances, instead of being an entity instance itself.

This change is also the first step for allowing mods and maps to bring their own Entity classes, since those can now be directly referenced from the xml file.

[Phantom Brave]

Game Maker is slower than Java, and Java can be used on any system, and in web browsers. Not to mention that if you don't compile to bytecode or whatever I'm thinking of, you can search for strings of code in the .jar.

I had to convert GG2's .gmk to .gm6 to view search for a spiece of code 

[Atomic1fire]

Actually, You could do the SUN thing and make it LGPL
Its what open office is under, and open office is also sold commercially as star office, with proprietary stuff added.
You would have the advantages of open source, but the but the option of a commercial venture,
even though you could make money with it being gpl, it would probably be support, or selling compiled games.
the alternative route would be go the ID software way and not opensource it until you cant make money with it anymore, so you just release the source to the community without any media, so people still have to make tiles and 3d modules, and add the parts of the engine that were removed when it was open sourced.