Potential Games

I updated my development platform to Java 1.6.0_18 and noticed a disturbing font alteration in all Java applications. I’m developing in Ubuntu 9.10, which currently bundles Java 1.6.0_15 (in the sun-java6-jdk package), so I manually installed the latest for testing.

I have yet (since yesterday) to investigate whether this is Ubuntu specific. Font configuration changes were noted in the Java 1.6.0_18 Release Notes, associated with a particular bug.

Preliminary investigation implies that Java’s attitude toward font consistency has changed over time. Early Java 1.3 Physical Fonts documentation makes clear that:

The SDK’s physical fonts offer … Consistent Look and Feel: Your applications will look the same on all platforms because they will be using the same fonts. This makes testing, deployment, and support easier in a cross-platform environment.

In contrast, a more recent bug submission was thoroughly thrashed for suggesting that fonts should remain consistent across platforms and versions. This seems to contradict one of the primary tenets of the Java platform: “Write once, run anywhere”

In the future, I’ll be looking into explicitly loading a specific font set, possibly by embedding custom fonts within my application.

Today’s SLOC count is 96,060 (4,237 less than my 100k analysis and 3,501 less than yesterday). While adding several new gameplay features, I was able to streamline the implementation in several places. This SLOC drop results from isolating (and removing) a good chunk of legacy logic, rules, and display code, which was impeding the integration of new features. Most importantly, playtesters should notice more direction in the gameplay, just as soon as I can deploy the next incremental Alpha release.

This morning, I noticed that my SLOC (Source Lines of Code) chart (in the sidebar of this blog) has breached the 100k mark (100,297sloc to be exact). That count is due to drop with the pending removal of some unused tools, defunct data structures, and legacy logic. Still, I thought it might be interesting to do a quick breakdown of the basic components:

The categories are:

• core: Networking, storage, and application framework libraries
• gui: Graphical User Interface implementation libraries
• client: RPG Client application (67% of which is client-specific GUI code)
• tools: Development helper applications
• server: RPG Server application
• other: Data structures, rules logic, and other game-supporting code