4 ms·

I've played around with making a strategy game in Java/Scala. It was surprisingly easy to work with. I didn't take it too far but performance was adequate (fo

I've played around with making a strategy game in Java/Scala. It was surprisingly easy to work with. I didn't take it too far but performance was adequate (for a 2D, turned based game). Anyone with experience making a "real" game in Java. I know http://www.freecol.org/ http://www.freecol.org/ is built in Java. Just wonder why it's not more popular for indie/casual games. Does performance degrade that much? I'm do mostly C# but I wanted to try the JVM for cross platform deployment.

Zarkonnen 17y ago
I'm writing a Java-based game ( plug: http://www.metalbeetle.com/spaceexploration/ http://www.metalbeetle.com/spaceexploration/ ). Performance can be very tricky if you want a good screen resolution, and there's lots of gotchas, like having to make sure that you force your sprites into the right colour space for your screen. On the plus side you get a reasonably fast, garbage-collected language to write your game in.
- tmountain 17y ago
  Looks great! I'll definitely be giving this a try.
noarchy 17y ago
Perhaps it isn't the most popular example, but isn't Runescape done in Java?
- Zarkonnen 17y ago
  Good point - it is. Though they have a somewhat strange approach of implementing everything - up to & including basic data structures - from scratch.
stonemetal 17y ago
Back when I was looking at trying to write a game in java(pre 05 or so). Java was horribly broken for games. Sound support was so so. On the graphics side Java 3d had been abandoned with vague promises of Opengl support. None of the third party Opengl bindings were mature. So I went back to C++.
jcromartie 17y ago
I really think it's just stigma. The joke goes: Knock knock! Who's there? ... ... Java! Of course today the performance of Java is fine, even comparable to C/C++ in some cases. Java2D is accelerated, the JDK comes with OpenGL/OpenAL, and there are all sorts of other libs like LWJGL and Slick. It might even be up there with XNA for desktop game development now, but I haven't done anything in-depth.

Zarkonnen 17y ago

I'm writing a Java-based game ( plug: http://www.metalbeetle.com/spaceexploration/ http://www.metalbeetle.com/spaceexploration/ ). Performance can be very tricky if you want a good screen resolution, and there's lots of gotchas, like having to make sure that you force your sprites into the right colour space for your screen. On the plus side you get a reasonably fast, garbage-collected language to write your game in.

tmountain 17y ago
Looks great! I'll definitely be giving this a try.

noarchy 17y ago

Perhaps it isn't the most popular example, but isn't Runescape done in Java?

Zarkonnen 17y ago
Good point - it is. Though they have a somewhat strange approach of implementing everything - up to & including basic data structures - from scratch.

stonemetal 17y ago

Back when I was looking at trying to write a game in java(pre 05 or so). Java was horribly broken for games. Sound support was so so. On the graphics side Java 3d had been abandoned with vague promises of Opengl support. None of the third party Opengl bindings were mature. So I went back to C++.

jcromartie 17y ago

I really think it's just stigma. The joke goes: Knock knock! Who's there? ... ... Java! Of course today the performance of Java is fine, even comparable to C/C++ in some cases. Java2D is accelerated, the JDK comes with OpenGL/OpenAL, and there are all sorts of other libs like LWJGL and Slick. It might even be up there with XNA for desktop game development now, but I haven't done anything in-depth.