Special Category: Java FX

2009-03-11 11:35 | Jörgen Björklund

Welcome to the JavaFX™ category of The Swedish Game Awards. If your game runs on the Java™ platform it’s eligible for competing in the JavaFX category. It’s important to stress that the game doesn’t have to be written in the Java programming language or JavaFX Script, it just have to run on the Java Virtual Machine.

Resources

For the Java game programmer, there are a lot of resources for developing a game.

If you’re new to Java game programming, have a look at the Javagaming site which contains a lot of good discussions on game programming in Java. Other than that, the most important resources for Java is of course the Java site and java.net where most of development on the Java platform is done completely in the open.

JavaFX™

JavaFX™ is the new rich graphical environment for the Java™ platform. The target market is, of course, rich internet applications, but since it’s built around a scene graph, it’s really ideal for games programming, intentional or not. It also has effects and timers and other stuff that helps developing 2D games.

Lightweight Java Gaming Library

The Lightweight Java Gaming Library is a comprehensive set of libraries for writing commercial quality games in Java such as scene graphs with OpenGL support, audio with OpenAL support and input devices support built on JInput.

http://www.lwjgl.org

jMonkeyEngine

jMonkeyEngine is a framework for serious, commercial 3D game development used by, well, commercial game developers. It has everything you need to develop a big game. Tag-line: Serious Monkeys. Serious Engine. From the site:

"ME (jMonkey Engine) is a high performance scene graph
based graphics API. Much of the inspiration for jME comes
from David Eberly's book 3D Game Engine Design.

jME was built to fulfill the lack of full featured
graphics engines written in Java. Using a abstraction
layer, it allows any rendering system to be plugged
in. Currently, both LWJGL and JOGL are supported.

jME is completely open source under the BSD license. You
are free to use jME in anyway you see fit, hobby or
commercial. All we ask is a little footnote (donations
are nice too.)"

http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/

Java OpenGL

JOGL is the low-level bindings library for Java and OpenGL. For fine-tuned control over hardware accelerated 3D graphics, there is nothing like JOGL. Hard, but hard core. Also included in LWJGL.

https://jogl.dev.java.net

Java OpenAL

JOAL is the low-level bindings library for Java and OpenAL. Fully professional 3D sound support for Java. Also included in LWJGL.

https://joal.dev.java.net

Phys2D

Phys2D is a Java implementation of the Box2D 2D physics engine. It’s fast, easy to work with and contains pretty much everything you need to add physics to your game. It’s great fun!

http://www.cokeandcode.com/phys2d

JBox2D

JBox2D is an alternative implementation of Box2D. It’s newer and the API is closer to the C API of Box2D. It’s equal to Phys2D and which one you choose is greatly a matter of taste.

http://www.jbox2d.org

JInput

JInput is crucial to getting any game device input to your action game, even if you’re only using the the keyboard. It enables you to use a wide range of input devices such as game pads, joysticks (analog and digital) and mice. It also has support for head trackers and other weird stuff. Included in LWJGL.

https://jinput.dev.java.net

PulpCore and Interactive Pulp

PulpCore is a 2D rendering framework for Java and Interactive Pulp is a game framework built on PulpCore. It offers tools for really nice graphics as you can see from the last two links. Beautiful!

Scala

You don’t have to write in Java. In fact: don’t. Use more productive languages instead. If you’re into statically typed languages and functional programming, Scala is your language. It has just about everything you want and compiles to java byte code. A really competent, dense language for the hard-code programmer.

http://www.scala-lang.org/

JRuby

Ruby is an absolutely lovely and great programming language and JRuby is a great, blazingly fast (several times faster than MRI) implementation of Ruby in Java. It integrates transparently with the Java platform and let you do dynamically typed programming for Java.