Sketcher 1

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 24/06/2010 22:00:51

Well, let me give it a try. I have Snow Leopard on my MacBook.

EDIT: Allright. Opened Safari on my MacBook with Java 6 on it and General 1 loaded immediately, but noticed that Java never let its memory consumption go beyond 96 MB, constantly garbage collecting the remaining 8 MB of free memory over and over instead. I was able to draw and Sketcher was otherwise fully functional. Tried Oasis 3, which is full of drawings. This room failed to load and the Java Console filled up with memory errors. It would seem that Java 6 on Snow Leopard is not honoring Sketcher's memory requirements. To remedy this, I clicked Macintosh HD, Applications, Utilities and Java Settings. I clicked "Java 6 (32-bit)" and "Options...", wrote "-ms96M -mx384M", and then did the same thing to "Java 6 (64-bit)" to be on the safe side. I closed Safari and reopened it, and Oasis 3 proceeded to load perfectly.

There is not a thing I can do about the fact that the MacOS X version of Java 6 is the only version that does not honor the "java_arguments" parameter for APPLET tags, perhaps except for migrating away from applets to Java Web Start. Here is the official document from Sun Microsystems that states that Java 6 implements this. I will investigate if Java Web Start lets you specify memory requirements in a platform independent way. Apple's slogan is "Think different." for a reason, though, and it wouldn't surprise me if their particular brand of Java Web Start does not honor these requirements either. The main reason that Apple's brand of Java is different is because Sun Microsystems does in fact not maintain their own version of Java for the Macintosh. Apple instead licenses the source code from Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and builds a custom version themselves. This leads to problems like the one you are experiencing right now.

Mac users report having problems with Firefox. I do nothing fancy in loading the Java applet and I don't know why it would be broken. Safari comes with every Apple system, however, and using it to run Sketcher is hardly a big problem.

Then tell me why for me, some particular versions of java 6, especially some of the later ones, have sketcher glitching up?
The "white box appearing over the canvas and chat" isn't exactly a new glitch either. And tends to happen most of the time with newer versions.
There were quite a few people with said problem too, and nothing would really help, but a downgrade to an earlier build of java 6.

I have heard of this issue and I have experienced intermittent problems, but their intermittent nature makes them impossible to debug since I can't consistently reproduce them for testing. I have an occasional problem where Sketcher appears to white out completely and stops responding. It turns out that this was actually the entire Java plugin crashing, exiting and leaving a blank browser window behind.

The first rule of Java is that no applet ever crashes the Java plugin, because this would be a glaring security hole. I began researching and found the crash logs. To my surprise, they seemed to tell me that JTablet was crashing the plugin. JTablet uses native C++ code to access the tablet driver, and this crash seemed to originate there, so I contacted Marcello about it. He corrected my first impression, however, by pointing out that the log in fact said that a Wacom driver file was crashing. Installing a newer Wacom driver fixed this problem. Bugs and crashes can come from the most surprising sources.

I have also heard from users who had a less severe problem of white squares covering the screen. One of these users told me that the problem went away when he replaced his graphics card or upgraded the display driver, I don't remember which. Java on Windows uses 3D acceleration for painting screen graphics if it is available, which can backfire if your vendor's DirectX/OpenGL implementation is buggy. There are switches you can pass to Java to disable acceleration, but at the possible penalty of reduced performance.