Hi,
I have created many game applets in the past, some of you may have played them, if you have been in the scene for a while.
I came back to modify/enhance my older creations on Win XP. I installed and tried both MS VM and Sun's JRE, and they are both extremely slow. I was wondering if anyone knows if anything has changed on Win XP regarding timing or something else that might have affected Java.
Thanks.
Basically it's very weird for both VMs. The MS VM is almost half-speed slow and also it seems that the one distributed (and now can only be found mirrored) as a separate download by MS, is different from the one inlcuded in Win ME for instance (which was lightning fast).
The 1.4.2 Sun VM although not slow, creates weird "hickups" in the frame rate and I've seen it in nany different games. The 1.3.x vm behaved a lot better.
Does anyone know if I should change something in my applets (all Java 1.1 compatible of course), to make them work better with Sun's VM?
Thanks.
Sun tinkered with the Sound API and now old code using AudioClip runs like a dog! It's because of the SPI thing and the Applets audio clip using it to support higher quality audio. (Yea! 16bit 44.1khz. Ugh! Runs like a dog! Besides, who's gonna wait for a 3 meg wav file, especially when you've got 20 of em, right?)
Solution: JavaSound API
Also: Yup, polyphony is something you must now concern yourself with! Shooting lasers sounds like a bad techno beat.... sorry for the bad news.
Wow, you're probably right as lags occur when multiple sounds are being played.
Also the way timing now works with System.currentTimeMillis() must have changed (internally)...
> Solution: JavaSound API
>
> Also: Yup, polyphony is something you must now concern
> yourself with! Shooting lasers sounds like a bad
> techno beat.... sorry for the bad news.
You're probably right but I need to stay compatible with older browsers/OS's. Thanks anyway...
What you're seeing is WORA at it's best...
Microsoft updated the multimedia APIs but Sun keeps calling the old functions which are now implemented using hardware emulation rather than direct hardware calls (the new functions call new hardware routines, the old ones used to call old hardware routines some of which are no longer supported so now use software emulation instead).
The Microsoft JVM cannot be changed to use the new APIs either because of the lawsuits Sun brought against Microsoft which led to an injunction stating Microsoft is prohibited to do any further development on their JVM.
