From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2008-03-31T04:30:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Web-based games?


From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net>
>
> I think a Rails-based browser game would be easier to maintain and 
> enhance/evolve that one written in PHP, but I don't see the point in 
> creating a game that people won't pay money to play.

Another approach that might yield something more eye catching than
traditional browser-based games, could be to implement the game as
a Java applet.  I recall seeing JRuby running in an applet... and
the Java APIs for graphics appear to have have finally matured to
point where high-quality hardware assisted rendering is now possible
in applets.

Even OpenGL support in browser applets is near ubiquitous now.
I've asked several gamers to try this OpenGL applet demo, and as I
recall it worked for all of them, after a one-time update to the
latest JRE if they had an older Java version installed:

https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/applettest.html

There's also the Lightweight Java Game Library, which supports
applets:  http://www.lwjgl.org/

And a 2D game library which I believe is based on top of LWJGL:
http://slick.cokeandcode.com/index.php


Of course... this is all probably moot unless JRuby can be 
applied to the problem, right?  <grin>

Hmmmmmmm.... Seems as of last September, at least, there were
still some issues:

http://mountaindude.blogspot.com/2007/09/jruby-in-applet.html


Oh well... I was hoping we were finally at the point where
we could easily write some high quality applet games in JRuby,
but it looks like we're not _quite_ there yet...


Regards,

Bill