Hello everyone. I have been hanging around here for a little while, but I have yet to officially introduce myself. So here goes...

My name is Dustin Sacks. I started to write a Risk game a few years ago because I was fed up with the quality/options of the one I played all the time. I have a macintosh, and the only Risk game available was an old System 7 era one. When I started I didn't really expect to release it as a product, but it was a fun programming project that I could focus my energies on. I was in the middle of a CS degree at the time.

I wrote it in Java because I had some experience from classes, I had an environment already set up, and because it was a safe option with the OS 9 to OS X switch coming up.

After I had written the game engine I got to talking with a friend of a friend who had done some artwork for a few macintosh shareware games. He convinced me that I should try and release it as shareware.

So I slapped a GUI on (albeit using the Mac OS X specific cocoa-java bridge - due to a case of swing dislike), gave it the name Lux, and released it near the end of 2002. That first version was pretty bad quality, but as time progressed I made it better and better. I added network play along with a game-finder, support for custom-made boards (instead of the random maps I had been using), etc, etc. Basically whatever the users asked for I added.

As the game got better and better there has been a noticeable increase in sales. From a few a month to the current level of 100+ a month. After I graduated from school I worked a real job for about 6 months saving up as much money as I could. With a little nest-egg saved up and some shareware income coming in I quit to work for myself full-time.

And that's how Sillysoft (http://sillysoft.net) was born!

Up until now Lux has only been available for Mac OS X. However I have just finished porting the GUI to use swing. I have been doing beta testing and I am planning to release the windows (cross-platform) version on monday. If you are interested in taking a peek then you can download it here (http://fuji.battlix.com/Lux-installer.zip) (Mac users should use this (http://sillysoft.net/Lux.dmg) instead). All feedback is welcome.

Greetings to a fellow mac developer, and a Canadian one to boot! :p

Lux is a good game and the next time I enter a "must play Risk" phase I'll may buy it.

As an aside, and as an interesting insight into the mind of a consumer, I should just tell you what happened when I tried out Lux a few months back. Basically I played it for a while and thought that it looked very promising and like it might be just what I was looking for. Then it crashed twice. But I guess it's testament to my overall experience with the game that it still remains in my mind as one of the games that I'm going to give another look to when I have a few "game bucks" burning a hole in my pocket. So while you may have temporarily lost a sale, you didn't loose a potential customer.

I'm not sure that that tale was of any use to anyone, but who knows... :confused:

www.angelfroggames.com

Thanks for your tale. I think that hearing the resons people didn't register is always useful.

And you've also given a testament why 'try before you buy' is so useful for consumers. We developers must live by it, or die by it.

Hurrah! Another Java developer! And a precious MacOS owner too!

LWJGL (http://www.lwjgl.org) needs you! We desperately need our Mac port updating to Cocoa so it plays nicely with Webstart.

Drop us a line if you're interested in taking it on :)

Cas :)

My game is very 2D. Thus I have been pretty satisfied with what java2D offers and haven't felt the need to look into java openGL access.

The best macintosh-java resources I know about is the java-dev mailing list. There are many experts there more than willing to answer questions. There has been a number of threads about javaWebStart there. Just in case that is of any help.
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/java-dev

Hi there. I'm a Java dev, too :)

Long story short: We know how webstart works. LWJGL is a neat/small/fast/easy to use OpenGL binding for Java. It works perfectly well, but there is a tiny problem one Mac OS if webstart is involved. That's because it's right now Carbon based and it needs to be ported to Cocoa.

So if you have some native Mac experience, it should be rather easy to fix that. It would be really nice if you could take a look :)

Oh and stop by at JGO:
http://www.javagaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi
(best Java board ever ;))

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Back to the topic... why don't you offer webstart? Downloading a zip, extracting(these two steps aren't necessary - most installers already compress very well), then starting an installer... it's just one click away with webstart. In addition there's some kind of download manager and version handling/autoupdate for free.

edit:
>My game is very 2D

Both games from Cas are also 2D and my current one, too. But we use OpenGL anyways, because it's way faster. Fast filtered scaling for free, accelerated full alpha, perfectly looking rotations etc and everything nicely accelerated.

There are just way too many no-nos with Java2D and right now even full alpha is one of 'em (if you need a usable framerate).

Yes, I thought about using webstart. However I wanted to act as much like a 'normal' application as possible. So that users can follow the same path they always do to install and run the application.

Also my installer offers to download a JVM if the user doesn't have one installed. This is not possible with webstart.

I agree that the unzip step is not neccesary and should be eliminated. I tried to put it all into a single exe but my first attempt was stymied, so I just made a zip file for now.

>However I wanted to act as much like a 'normal' application as possible.

Of course. That's just sensible. But there is no reason to block out people, who know about webstart (most likely they will prefer webstart then).

So just add webstart as an option on the download page (multi platform)... you can put the java cup icon there.

I almost downloaded the jar wich was for linux (I use windows), but I read there that it's also an installer (I really don't know why you are doing that).

Oh and take a look at the NSIS installer. It's really neat, free and compresses reasonable well.
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

I use an installer because my application needs to have a place on the filesystem to store stuff (like map files for example). So the user chooses where to install Lux, and then it uses subdirectories of the install location.

The installer package I am using is called IzPack. It's free, open-source, and written in java so it can run on all platforms. It integrates into ant, so that I can build the entire installation package from my OSX box easily. It also has an open-source 'native launcher' exe for windows to check for a JVM and do stuff if it isn't present.
http://www.izforge.com/izpack/