Re: Java version of XPilot

> If you have any questions or comments or complaints or want a snapshot of
> the code, let me know.

(I post this here as well as I don't know if you follow xpilot-hacks)

The idea of an xpilot client written in Java has always interested me,
and I've actually written a simple xpilot-like game just to test the
idea. However, so far I've not started doing anything for real because I
have not been able to find a good reason to do it. I mean the C client
works relatively well on all platforms supported by Java and I think a C
program will (nearly) always be faster than a corresponding Java
program. And xpilot is all about speed, I would not play using a client
with additional n ms client lag.

Anyway, if you think the task is worth doing I've a few comments on the
technical side. First, I hope (=didn't bother to check) all those new
java features like genercis  etc. work on older JREs, because people
find it annoying to always have to download the latest JRE. Second, you
say that you are working through the C files porting them to Java.
Wouldn't a complete rewrite be much cleaner? The current code is very
C:ish (for obvious reasons), so the resulting Java won't probably look
too nice. Finally, you say that you'll use managed BufferedImages to get
accelerated drawing. IIRC a managed buffer might live inside the
graphics card (or at least outside the garbage collected heap). AFAIK
this means that blitting images might be hw accelerated, but the xpilot
client does not do much blitting. What you need is hw accelerated
graphics primitives like drawing lines, polygons, etc. So I suggest you
take a look at e.g. LWJGL (http://java-game-lib.sourceforge.net), it
supports  OpenGL which should be faster than directly manipulating a
buffer with Java2D. It also supports gcj so you should be able to build
native binaries for easy distribution.

- Juha