What's the applet error 7 and would it be possible to elaborate the message on future releases? I'm running into it on one of my applets (but not all and I see no difference between the ones that work and the one that doesn't), and it's like hitting a brick wall because there's nothing to point me in the right direction. By the way, the applets that work are in the same directory as the one that doesn't, so that I know it's not a version thing.

error 7 mean that the application crashed when switching from the applet loader to your applet.

a quick key of what the error codes from the appletloader mean can be seen in the AppletLoader Source, the state relating to the number is printed out in the java console but your right a slightly more meaningful message should be displayed instead of just the number, will consider adding this to the AppletLoader.

public static final int STATE_INIT = 1;
public static final int STATE_DETERMINING_PACKAGES = 2;
public static final int STATE_CHECKING_CACHE = 3;
public static final int STATE_DOWNLOADING = 4;
public static final int STATE_EXTRACTING_PACKAGES = 5;
public static final int STATE_UPDATING_CLASSPATH = 6;
public static final int STATE_SWITCHING_APPLET = 7;
public static final int STATE_INITIALIZE_REAL_APPLET = 8;
public static final int STATE_START_REAL_APPLET = 9;
public static final int STATE_DONE = 10;
as for your problem, have a look at the java console, and see if it gives you a more meaningful error as to what the problem is and if any exception is being thrown.

Thanks for the response, but the console also only says error 7.

hmm, bit difficult to tell whats the issue with only that much information, got a link you can post that reproduces the error?

Ha-hah, my point exactly! But here you go: http://www.agpgames.com/agpstuff/Racer.html

hmm, had a look but not really sure what it could be, just seems to stop at that particular point with no meaningful error.

One things I did notice is that it is a pretty big jar, almost 20mb, you could try split it into two jars, racer.jar and data.jar, put all the sounds, images and models in data.jar and the code in racer.jar and see if it makes any difference.

Cool, I'll try that, thanks. It's the one song alone that takes 10MB, and I downsampled about as far as I ought to.

EDIT: I made it so that the two jars were each about half the original size, but it did not help, error 7 keeps happening.

is your Racer class an applet? can you post the code for it? or at least the basic outline of you Racer class?

I wouldn't like to, no. Suffice it to say that I have written many applets before. Case in point (and this is much simpler, at least in terns of graphics because the ghosts were so-so to write): www.agpgames.com/agpstuff/RatmanGL.html

And this one uses the lwjgl joystick as well.

Okay, the first line of my init() is System.out.println("I'm inside init()."); That doesn't get printed, so how can this error 7 be my applet's fault?

you could try and debug the applet ... you know, attach to one and check whats going on ...

Attach to one? Could you explain how for me because I learned to program (a decade ago) with a text editor and a command prompt compiler. Not a lot of tools at my disposal. I'm starting to think I ought to use NetBeans but as it is I'm not, so how would I go about debugging? Sorry if the question sounds stupid or simple.

quick google: http://www.nakov.com/blog/2008/08/20/debugging-java-applets-in-eclipse/

Thanks. I downloaded NetBeans instead because I was told it was much better than Eclipse, and I can't really figure out how to debug, so it hasn't done anything other than annoy me (I find my programming style much more freeing). So to shorten the story: still don't have a clue as to what error 7 is. If you guys have a beta version with more elaborate error messages, PLEASE let me have it.

There isn't one. I'll take a look tonight.