Gemini game engine development

Web Start September 5, 2008

Back when working on one of my educational games, I was really impressed with Guild Wars. They had it so you could download a small (100k-200k) installer, which would download and install the game automatically. Once the game was installed, it would constantly stream resources to you as you played. I liked it a lot since it was virtually a zero hassle setup, and I wanted it for my game. I also wanted to do things cross-platform.

Then David shows me Java Web Start, which was pretty impressive. I wasn’t too excited at the time, since I had a lot of that negative experience with working with Java in my early school days, and I was too much of a C++ snob at the time. After cutting teeth against JRuby for a while, web start felt like it was the only way to deploy a JRuby desktop app.

One of the things I want to work really well in Gemini is the ability to pop out web start deployments. This will also include Applets. As an applet, Gemini will make browser-based game development possible without Flash, which isn’t really a tool designed for game development. I can’t speak for Silverlight, but that’s Windows as far as I understand.

Last night, I got webstart working for one of our examples (although I’m finding out that it isn’t working for everyone):

http://www.happycamperstudios.com/gemini/ultra-table-tennis/ultra-table-tennis.jnlp