Java for Game Dev

Talk about game designs and what goes behind designing games.
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Xaos
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:01 am

Java for Game Dev

Post by Xaos »

Has anyone used Java for game dev, including for Android development? How were your experiences with it? Obviously C# and C++ are much more popular for Game Dev, but i'm just curious if anyone has done any extensive game dev with Java.
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a_bertrand
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Re: Java for Game Dev

Post by a_bertrand »

For Android Java is quite certainly the way to go. C# is more popular only on windows... and through unity. Honestly I stopped using Java long time ago. I was a big fan and was totally kicked out by all the (big) issues there was at that time (some of which are still here today). I will probably never use it again.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Java for Game Dev

Post by Jackolantern »

jMonkey Engine is the most impressive Java game engine, but it is of course not as impressive as Unity (few accessible engines are). On the plus side, it is completely free and open source. You can buy the definitive ebook on it for $5 right now in Packtpub's big sale. You can distribute your games to Linux, Windows and Mac (obviously since it is Java), and Android and Ouya. They say iOS support is coming soon, but wow, no idea how they are going to pull that off.

Outside of jMonkey, there is a very lightweight 2D and 3D engine called LWJGL that has a couple of nice looking projects made with it. And if you don't want to work with a game engine, I would say skip it. You will be working so low-level with OpenGL, that you might as well go C++ with DirectX/OpenGL or C#.

I personally like Java, but I do acknowledge its problems. C# has really evolved a long way past it, and I can't help but miss a ton of nice .NET features when using it, such as C#'s properties while I am writing 20 accessor and mutator methods in Java :P
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Xaos
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Re: Java for Game Dev

Post by Xaos »

I really like java, but it may just be because its my first true OOP language. I think I may check out that engine, just for simple stuffs. thanks.Are there good tuts and whatnot?
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Java for Game Dev

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

I toyed with Jmonkey ages ago. Just not a java fan at all.
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