Lycaon

What's worse is that it's not just QLD that's been effected (though they did get the worst of it), Victoria has had some flooding over the last couple of days as I understand it. Even down here in Tassie there's been some damage - it's been pissing down for the last four days and there's probably been two dozen homes that have been evacuated because of it. The weather is coming from due north, so we're basically getting everything QLD did but just to a lesser extent - I can't imagine how bad it must've been up there, considering we've had basically 300mm of rain in the past 24 hours and it's virtually come all the way down the coast of Australia before hitting here. Seems to be that the entire east coast has been hurt by this to some extent, feels really bloody weird for the middle of summer and it's not something I see Australia recovering from quickly.

My point was that you still program in java, there is no 'alternative language' AFAIK - you still use standard java IDE's (Eclipse/NetBeans/JCreator etc, though the Android API is thrown in as well of course) and still compile it as Java (atleast I do), but the compiled bytecode is run through an external tool first. That's the only practical difference between Java and Dalvik in terms of the applications themselves, the bytecode. The fact that a tool even exists to convert between the two speaks volumes about their similarities, regardless of how the back-end virtual machine is implemented. Also, Oracle are suing Google over the two VM's being too similar; Dalvik itself isn't based upon Java, but Oracle are claiming that Google has violated several patents in regards to intellectual property even if the Dalvik VM doesn't meet Java standards. I don't think there's anything particularly illegal about what Google's apparently done, just that they didn't have license to do so at the time. Or such is my understanding of it all anyway, I'm not really a java developer and I can't say that I wake up in the morning thinking "Java", "Dalvik" and "OMG Oracle sued Google!!!!".

Thinking about re-activating my old account in a couple of weeks and figure it's best if I join a village, atleast for a while. Are you still recruiting? Not sure if it was you or not, but a long long time ago myself and a couple of friends swam past HK after converting (I think, same island anyway) and settled on a small island just west (or was it east...) of you guys. Finished building a tower and was going to plant a deed, but we collectively stopped playing around 2007/2008 - tried to come back later but some other bastard had walled off our island!

, forgot about that. It's more or less the reason I went for an Android phone. You still program in Java (and in most cases you can still compile java bytecode initially), but I suppose the fact that Dalvik is not based on java and is register based vs standard Java's stack-based is enough to differentiate the two if you want to be semantic about it. At home here I just run my .class files through dx which converts them to Dalvik-compatible bytecode.

Java isn't my favourite of languages by any stretch of the word (been working with C++ for 7+ ish years, so I'm a little biased) but I fail to see why it's such a bad choice for an MMO (particularly a smaller, indie-based one where they need the user base to be as wide as possible), nor anything else for that matter. A couple of points. 1. Java isn't slow. A lot of people seem to be talking as if it's parsing strings at runtime, it's not. Java is a compiled bytecode language, it's fast, faster than any other non-machinecode language I know of. Modern machines are getting so quick now that even the very minor overhead incurred by the JRE (mostly just memory anyway IIRC) is becoming practically nil. As for C/C++/Assembly being 'faster', yes, they have that potential but more often than not it depends on the programmer being able to use certain tricks to optimise a given application in a given language, if a Java dev attempts to optimise a C program using java 'tricks', then chances are that the C version will no faster or even potentially slower than the equivalent Java application. 2. It's platform independent. I can't stress how useful this is. Being able to run Wurm on linux/BSD/mac/your Amiga 1200 {God I should try that} is a huge, huge, huge boon. It increases the potential playerbase and makes those of us who do use something other than windows daily much happier. Besides, it saves the devs a heap of time - have you ever freakin' tried to port platform/OS-specific, complex [machine]code over from one platform to another? 3. Huge range of avaliable libraries, easy to use & learn for anyone coming from a static typed/compiled OO language and very stable/mature. That's more handy from a developers standpoint but it still rubs off on the players, I think. In the end, the client being slow, buggy or "ugly" has nothing to do with the language and more to do with the actual code. The OpenGL backends Wurm is built on are just wrappers for exactly the same API that every OGL C app in the world uses and is no less capable of pretty things. I always find it interesting how those with even some coding experience are willing to sit back and wait for things to be fixed more than the hypercritical, unqualified and oft demanding "regular" playerbase. For the record I'm not saying that you're all like that, the majority of you seem to be level headed but it's still interesting none the less. Cheers. Edit: The vast majority of Android is run in the Dalvik Java VM (purely because it's cross platform), but has core platform-dependant parts written in another machinecode language such as C. This allows phone manufacturers to adapt just a small portion of the platform to a specific phone, using whatever hardware they want (case-in-point is that there's already an x86 android in development) and just slap Android on top of it. Or such is my understanding anyway, I'm not overly well versed in Android considering I've just started to write code for it.

Yeah, you know what? I am going to whinge and cry about it. Because it's completely unnecessary - like I said, it devalues whatever point someone else is trying to get across. And sure, there have been others, but at least they've either stopped or are not replying to every post berating them for their pathetic posting habits. Just accept it for God's sake. Again, yes I would prefer dead forums to this pointless situation that makes every thread look like a chat room. If I wanted silly comments for 3/4 of the bloody forum, I'll go and post in 4chan. Remember, this is a forum for Wurm.

Sorry Raloc, it was a lot more than three threads.. And when people see a topic, they expect to find discussions on that topic within not some silly little pissing game between people wanting to get there post count up. When they see heaps of replies, they expect to be entertained for a while. Not read some completely unrelated 2-word comment. Also, maturity is measured far beyond what's "for children". Heck, I know 25 year olds that watch DragonballZ, and still have enough maturity and intelligence not to fill up a forum with stupid comments that effectively derail and devalue another's thoughts and the discussion they want to receive from it. Fair enough, most people have stopped - and that I'm sure, everyone says thankyou, but if your going to sit here and insult others about having a problem with your posts, which have nothing of intellectual value most of the time, then don't expect cuddles from another forum member when they bite back.