Slick Forums

Woogley and I have been working on Playground.

Playground is a game launcher, it's currently a prototype that were trying stuff out on. It uses a central database hosted at javaunlimited.net to provide a list of categorised games which can then be launched (using JNLP but not webstart ) at the click of a button.

The prototype is still very prototype but has had a major update since last seen.

Comments and suggestions, bearing in mind this is still a prototype, appreciated.

Current the first time you use the client it'll go and grab a list of games from the central server. After this a local cache will be used - to get an updated list hit the "Update" button on the main menu.

The launching should now work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Kev

By "central database," are you connecting to an actual DBMS remotely? I'd love to do that, but none of the servers I have access to permit external connections right now.

Na, it goes through a set of PHP scripts to the database, however the details of that are wrapped in a Java API (talk to Woogley nicely for details). Connecting to a database directly is considered dodgy security wise.

Kev

works well when running super trooper for some reason i get this repeating in the console every now and then
"native_blitbuffer: select error occured"
but other seem to work fine other than that

That's what I thought and makes a bit more sense.

- Eliwood

Some updates:

- Backend server stuff should work with Java Proxy settings now
- Favourites List Implemented
- Cursor/Controller input support aded
- Fullscreen mode added
- Colour theme settings added

It all seems to hang together - just no idea where to go next.

http://slick.cokeandcode.com/demos/playground.jnlp

Kev

More Games

What would be nice : a beta test section for games still in development.

- The concept of a user profile and everything that comes with that.
- User-uploaded games which appear after admin approval.
- User commenting/rating games.

Other than that, it's a matter of seeing how well this scales up to many games (interface-wise). That's actually what I want to see.

The other minor concern I have is that the transition back from the game to PG is a little slow for my tastes. What's going on there that makes it slower than going from PG to the game?

User profile is kinda already in place - based on faves and theme select atm. However, this could be extended server side.

Comments/Rating submittal rely on the backend server, but I see the client side implementation of this as pretty trivial (hence not in the prototype).

User uploaded games is again based on stuff that Woogley is working on. However, the infrastructure for this is more complicated that the client side stuff - so may be a little while. It is underway though.

And yeah, the transition back to PG is a pain. Unfortunately in LWJGL there is no way to minimise the window while the game is playing - so I have to destroy the display to get the PG window off the screen. A side effect is that all textures are lost so time taken is reloading and recreating the textures for each game (this won't scale well for large numbers of games).

Options I'd be thinking about were

- Don't destroy the display, just leave it in place.
- Badger LWJGL for a minise function
- Port the whole thing into Java2D (not terribly keen, past experience tells me that Java2D is always slow somewhere)
- Put the current context on an AWTGLCanvas and use a JFrame (currently my fave)
- Load textures on demand as requried (though I hate this one since it'll make the interface less responsive at times)

I'm just not sure theres much more to find out with the prototype right now - other than stick a whole bunch of games in there and looking at the interface response/userability.

The other option is to take it more seriously and polish up this into a full implementation. I'm don't really want to commit the effort right now unless I can envisage where this tool might actually be useful.

Kev