Good point... but... it is possible to mitigate a lot of that evolution by abstracting your code so that it can take advantage of shaders in the future. If you use "brushes" instead of textures and in the interim procedurally generate some of the textures and load some of the others, you can in the future switch to using a shader script for the same brush and reap the performance and visual benefits.
But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. It is pretty difficult to make my point without insulting people. But since I have said it before I will say it again. Most people who ask "is java good for gaming" fall into several major categories. The first one is the dabbler who wants to get into graphics. The second is the guy who wants to write the next Quake III, EverQuest, Giants, Morrowind or whatever game that person happens to think is the "best". The third type would be serious published game dev shops evaluating potential tech for their next set of games. Most of the 3rd type would never ask the question, because they wouldn't trust the answer anyway, they would instead research it themselves and come to their own conclusions. It's the second category of knowledge seekers which my original comment was regarding. If you are a relative novice game developer, which most of us are (and about 9999 out of 10000 wanna be game developers are) and you are deciding on a graphics technology based on cutting edge techniques then you are doing yourself a huge disservice. I will stick by my marathon metaphore. If you are 25 pounds overweight and walk into a shoe store and demand to only look at the shoes which are suitible for running a marathon then the guys would laugh. I also guess the question also strikes at my own ego. When people constantly state on this list and on javagaming that Java3d is not good for games, or not acceptable for cutting edge games, or some other criticism of the technology, but they do so with limited experience in Java3d and in the face of other games and applications being developed... well it seems to me that they are distainfully looking at the people who *do* believe in the technology and waving their hands and stating that none of us know what we are talking about, or that the examples they can see don't measure up to some quality standard they pulled out of their... behinds... Someone posted once that they were looking for examples of *good* java3d games which would prove to him that Java3d could get the job done. He was pointed to Roboforge and IL2Sturmovik and other Java games, as well as sites of other projects underway... and he waved his hands and said he was less than impressed with them and they weren't of the quality he was looking for.. I was a bit angered by this because in one wave of his hands he wiped away probably 100 man years of work and derrided their efforts as inadequate and that he somehow would be able to do better, if only he wasn't held back and hampered by whatever technology he had to use. What arrogance! Anyway... maybe someday it won't bother me. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Justin Couch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 9:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [JAVA3D] is java good for game development? Yazel, David J. wrote: > quick demo app showing some neat shaders. To presume that Java3d is going > to be the limiting factor in the quality of your game at market time is a > bit like saying that your ability to win the next marathon is dependent on > the quality of the shoes you will be wearing. That's a pretty niave statement about game development. Games take 2-3 years to write. That's a known fact. However, they take 2-3 years after a particular piece of functionality has been exposed in the API. That means if Java3D takes another 2 years to get shaders (ie an FCS specification, not betas) then it is _at least_ 5 years before any Java3D games are on the market. Considering that you are seeing the first generation games coming out now that use shaders that makes any Java3D game 5 years behind the market that want to have comparable level of graphics. Not particularly good for encouraging people to use the API for developing top-notch, high-end games. Of course, the one mitigating factor in this particular example is that the J3D shader code is going to ignore the first generation completely and come in somewhere around the same time that the other competitive APIs do - ie high-level shader language. Therefore, a good chunk of that lag is going to just disappear and hopefully J3D, OGL and DX9/10 games will all start from roughly the same capability set. At that time, hopefully the ability to code Java code faster than C/C++ will lead to a situation where J3D games hit the market sooner than their OGL/DX equivalents. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". 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