JavaFX Community Game project

[Danno Ferrin]

Obligatory rant on pedantic reply-all to list standards.

On Dec 4, 2012 4:06 PM, "Danno Ferrin" <danno.ferrin at shemnon.com> wrote:
>
> Club penguin in JFX is exactly the same thought I had.  Except having it
run not just in the browser but also on iOS and Android from the same
codebase would be the competitive value.  There have been many times where
getting the kids out the door for long trips would have been easier if I
could just get them to switch over to club penguin on the kindle.
>
> On Dec 4, 2012 3:11 PM, "Daniel Zwolenski" <zonski at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'd be interested in potentially being involved with that collaborative
game development effort.
>>
>> I've got buckets to do on improving deployment/maven but one reason I'd
be interested in this is because it will nicely raise the issue of how do
we deploy and distribute such a game, can we get it in the app stores, etc
(and after that, how do we get it on android and iOS). I promise not to
make noise about deployment until the end though.
>>
>> Tower defender seems like a good, simple starting point. I'll have a
look around later for an existing OSS java one - maybe we can get away with
just skinning it.
>>
>> Longer term I think a potential game market for jfx could be along the
space of Club Penguin: http://www.clubpenguin.com/
>>
>> This is a hugely popular platform and is flash based. Jfx should be able
to compete with that (if it had a good deployment option and mobile/tablet
support), especially since the server is java based so you can use the same
devs on front and backend.
>>
>> Quite a bit more complex to build but I built Coinland (effectively
Penguin with much less bells and whistles) with a team of 4 devs in 3
months so it's not out of the realm of feasability.
>>
>> https://coinland.com.au/
>>
>>
>>
>> On 05/12/2012, at 7:24 AM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi John,
>> >
>> > Just getting through my email and have had this one flagged since
Devoxx :-). I respond below to individual points but most of these are
probably not worth you responding back on (they're just informational on my
part) -- rather, down at the end is the real question I want to have a
discussion on (and will be a lot of fun to solve while we're at it).
>> >
>> >> 1. Do any such games, animations or visualisations exist yet?
>> >
>> > Yes. Much like Swing, JavaFX is seeing a lot of adoption in the heavy
enterprise desktop sorts of use cases -- not the kind of thing you will
find when browsing the internet. Most of these folks don't advertise the
technology they're using, and most of them are not interested in letting
their competitors know what they're doing or what technology they're using.
Which basically means, if we haven't built a demo for it, there isn't
anything you will find in your travels.
>> >
>> >> 2. If not, how does Oracle or anyone else actually know that JavaFX is
>> >> capable of supporting such applications?
>> >
>> > That is a good question. Many of the folks I've talked to building
such applications have done incredible work + proof of concepts long before
I even knew they were using JavaFX. Now, each year we do pretty graphically
intense demos for JavaOne, so we have a pretty good feel for it. We have a
bunch of benchmarks where we crank the number of nodes up to pretty high
numbers, and we know from these benchmarks (at least) that we scale very
well compared to other technologies. But I know neither the samples nor the
results are publicly available. But at least I can answer the "how does
Oracle … know" part of the question.
>> >
>> > We have had a performance team from the get-go who were solely
dedicated to writing benchmarks, running benchmarks, and analyzing results.
This has been incredibly helpful. We have results that come not just from
the weekly integrations but even from intra-week builds on specific scrum
repositories. We have benchmarks and analysis for both desktop and embedded
and take performance very seriously.
>> >
>> > Now, there are a lot of ways to use the platform. Some things are
better tuned than others. Performance work is driven by tuning and
benchmarks. So when we run into issues we have to (a) determine how likely
that is to be an issue to the broader development community (b) figure out
what the tradeoffs are (usually performance & quality are directly in
contradiction with each other), and ( c) schedule & implement the fix. Of
course, the same few people (Jim, mostly) are involved in many of the
performance fixes and features (like Canvas), so scheduling is an issue and
feedback from customers as to what they are actually running into (vs. what
a theoretical issue is) has priority.
>> >
>> >> 3. Do I have the wrong understanding that JavaFX is supposed to
support such
>> >> applications?
>> >
>> > We expect that JavaFX will be usable for casual games, but we are not
building a gaming platform to compete with Unity and the like. If we happen
to be just as good, then that's awesome, but it isn't our primary goal.
Advanced visualizations, on the other hand, are part of our target market
(medical, pharma, enterprise desktop, etc)
>> >
>> >> 4. Is it possible that, for whatever reason, JavaFX is simply not
capable of
>> >> supporting such applications?
>> >
>> > There are natural trade-offs between an immediate mode (like Canvas)
API and a retained mode (like Scene Graph) API. Now that we have both (plus
Java2D + ImageWriter and such for the really crazy cases) we should be
capable of a wide range of use cases. However, some things are not yet
optimized. But there is no technical reason why we shouldn't be quite
capable.
>> >
>> > Another area we have not yet exposed API which is problematic for some
people is in the area of custom shaders. It may be that without some kind
of custom shader support (which would have to be made to work on D3D as
well as OpenGL) certain use cases cannot be easily fulfilled.
>> >
>> >> My feeling that JavaFX can indeed support such applications is based
on the
>> >> fact that it is hardware accelerated and therefore it should be
limited
>> >> mostly by the capabilities of the graphics card and also because it
is often
>> >> talked about in this way.  However, I have observed varying levels of
>> >> performance that don't quite follow these principles such as JavaFX
>> >> performing poorly with choppy/jittery animations and transitions on
my most
>> >> powerful machine with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 (the current fastest
>> >> graphics card in the world) but performing quite well on machines
with much
>> >> lower specifications.
>> >
>> > It is highly unlikely that this is due to performance issues. As
mentioned in the last few days on another thread, there are smoothness
issues that are completely separate from performance (although both are
often talked about together). We're working on the smoothness. Sometimes
this is an application problem as opposed to a platform problem (one such
example is the DisplayShelf sample, which needs to be rewritten).
>> >
>> >> So I guess I am curious to know what kinds of testing and evaluations
Oracle
>> >> has undertaken to determine the performance characteristics of JavaFX
and
>> >> exactly what kinds of applications it is actually suitable for.  For
>> >> example, I am yet to see any JavaFX application with even the
sophistication
>> >> of a Flash electronic greeting card or banner ad and yet I assume
JavaFX
>> >> will be used for such purposes eventually.
>> >
>> > I would imagine any of our demos from the last 3-4 years of JavaOne
would demonstrate much more complicated use cases than that! But, instead
of me just complaining -- lets build one! We'll add it both to Ensemble and
our test suite. We can start with something simple (like a greeting card)
and expand it out to something wildly complex. What would you like to see?
One thing I've wanted to build for years but haven't found the time for was
a tower defense game. But what would you think would be a good example of
graphics performance that would tell you "hey, this platform is great for
visualizations"?
>> >
>> > Richard
>> >