So, everybody knows that Apple's OS X Leopard operating system did not ship with Java 6. Even Java 5 did not work too well on it. Which is sad.
But then a smart individual called Landon Fuller stood up and with the help of the open source community he ported a version of BSD Java 6 to Leopard. This project is called SoyLatte and today they announced third preview release.
It is not production ready yet and it works only on Intel Macs at the moment. There are things missing like sound and native Swing implementation. But it seems to be active project and very interesting to follow. Unfortunately my mac is older with PPC architecture and this port wont work on it.
SoyLatte project site
Landon Fuller's blog
Archive for November of 2007
Some good Java news for Leopard users
November 28, 2007Easy hobby programming with jMonkey Engine
November 05, 2007
After jMonkey Engine reached version 1.0 I decided to take a better look at it. So, this weekend I spent time checking examples, documentations and coding. And I have to say I am pretty happy with it.
I mentioned before, I have an idea for a simple game. The idea of it is that player could manufacture own fireworks in the workshop and then fire them away outdoors. Yea, it is far from World of Warcraft but I wanted something simple, fun and suitable for smaller kids also.
Those fireworks rely heavily on particle effects and therefore I started to learn about those. There are some useful examples and a nice particle test bench in the jME. Starting with those I managed to get my fireworks flying pretty easily. I only had to memorize some Newton's laws - shame on me. Other issues were zbuffering and alpha settings but searching jME discussion forums solved that.
After that it was time to add ground and sky. Again, there were examples providing ideas how to do such. This was more or less painless in programming vise but creating nice images of sky with stars caused headache. I used old Bryce 5 which used to work on OS X 10.3 but turned out to be really unstable on OS X 10.4.
Naturally a game needs some sound effects. I searched for suitable free sounds and I added sound playing calls. Again, minor problems as I did not know that volume of the audio clip has to be set explicitly.
At this point I refactored code and modified game to use more modern StandardGame instead of older SimpleGame. I am not sure how important it is to use StandardGame but it was easy to do at this point and I hope it will make switching between workshop and outdoor scenes easier.
I mentioned before, I have an idea for a simple game. The idea of it is that player could manufacture own fireworks in the workshop and then fire them away outdoors. Yea, it is far from World of Warcraft but I wanted something simple, fun and suitable for smaller kids also.
Those fireworks rely heavily on particle effects and therefore I started to learn about those. There are some useful examples and a nice particle test bench in the jME. Starting with those I managed to get my fireworks flying pretty easily. I only had to memorize some Newton's laws - shame on me. Other issues were zbuffering and alpha settings but searching jME discussion forums solved that.
After that it was time to add ground and sky. Again, there were examples providing ideas how to do such. This was more or less painless in programming vise but creating nice images of sky with stars caused headache. I used old Bryce 5 which used to work on OS X 10.3 but turned out to be really unstable on OS X 10.4.
Naturally a game needs some sound effects. I searched for suitable free sounds and I added sound playing calls. Again, minor problems as I did not know that volume of the audio clip has to be set explicitly.
At this point I refactored code and modified game to use more modern StandardGame instead of older SimpleGame. I am not sure how important it is to use StandardGame but it was easy to do at this point and I hope it will make switching between workshop and outdoor scenes easier.
Facebook and annoying applications
November 03, 2007
Arr... I joined Facebook some time ago but it did not really get me interested in it. The main reason was its slowness and confusing user interface. I was mostly curious about those 3rd party applications and how to develop one. Today I got notification that my friend has added a question application. But I can not answer to any of those questions without adding the same application to my own page. And that is so annoying... So instead playing with such I rather continue experimenting with jMonkey Engine and its particle features.