Best Java Games

Best Java Games I'm a little bit cynical about developing in Java. It is such a nice language, but I find myself having hard time finding games that are developed in it. With flash, I can find 2,500 games in an instant. With Java it took me several hours to find 300 or so. Not sure which comes first here, the chicken or the egg. Here is a listing of the best and most successful Java games I've found. Subby and the Fishes RuneScape Bang Howdy Milpa Alien Flux Puzzle Pirates Tribal Trouble goSupermodel Lux Coke and Code Games Erik v...

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Subby and the Fishes: Postmortem

So how did the development "Subby and the Fishes" go. My goal was to write a simple applet game that could be sold to advertising based sites. Lets review 10 things that went right and 10 things that went wrong on the development. The Good: Starting with a small project. Choosing Java2D over 3D. Rewriting to make code more elegant Having other people play it. The Bad: Estimate to completion was completely off. No refined sprite class. No refined sprite manager class. Display class was not abstracted The Good in detail: 1. Starting...

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Drawing Sprite Speed Test

In an attempt to make my code a bit more elegant, robust, and fast, I've started review my newly created Sprite class in detail. I included percentage resizing and alpha blending. I chose an easy way to alpha blend but had two choices on how to resize my images. I started to become curious: What is the best way to draw my sprites in Java 2D? I turned off my sleep timer in the game loop and then drew a 59x448 pixel index image on to my canvas. Note I tried the same image as RGB and had scary slow downs. Making sure your art work is all indexed...

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Finish Damin it!

While looking at books at Amazon, I found an forum discussion that posed the question, "Can a self taught programmer get a job?" The answer was a resounding yes but with a few caveats. Note I'm not really interested in a job; I'm interested in making games which requires being a good programmer. So the discussion was pertinent to my goal and steps that I should take. The first thing that was rejected was the idea of certifications, most saying they are waste. (My guess is that this is only partially true because you just never know if one word...

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Timers: Part Two

Timers:Part One | Part Two Lets start with a review of Part One. Any increments of 10 ms jitters Java on Windows. High frame rates are not as important as smooth graphics The loopGame delay smoother must never be negative. With this in mind, I've decided to build a simple but real game called "Subby and the fishes." For the beginning of my development, I was setup on my desktop PC. With my delay smoother set to 21 milliseconds and a hefty graphics card, a Radeon 3800, everything ran smoothly. Once I moved the code over to my laptop with...

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Timers: Part One

Timers:Part One | Part Two I've had to learn more about timers than I really wanted to. My testing gave quite confusing results, so I had to dig into the issues and was not very satisfied with the answers. The bottom line is the resolution of Java timers is not very accurate because Java doesn't play well with Windows processor in a multiple processor architecture. Mac and Linux are fine, even with multiple processors, according to many other game programmers. It seems that Windows will sleep processes in different areas of the processor or even...

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OpenGL and D3D Pipeline

OpenGl Pipe versus D3D Pipe: On my desktop, OpenGL showed no performance increase. However, turning off D3D gave a huge speed hit, dropping FPS by 30%. -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false Unlike "-Dsun.java2d.opengl=True" where the capital "T" in true lets us know if it is initialized in the IDE, -Dsun.java2d.d3d=True doesn't let us know if it is connected. I have Direct X 9 on both of my test machines. Oddly only my desktop takes the speed hit when I turn off D3d. If I turn it off on my laptop, frame rate remains the same. So I did an interesting...

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Optimizing Java 2D for a game

I like Java 2D. 3D engines seem overwhelming for me at the moment despite the fact that the pros say OpenGL or an OpenGL wrapper is the way to go. I'm a firm believer that 2D art still rocks hard with the right artist. The "Mona Lisa" was not tossed out of the museum when "The Thinker" statue was added to the collection. The question is can I do a large screen implementation that is fast enough for most computers. I have my doubts that it will be fast enough but I'll let the numbers decide. Goal: 100 FPS with a reasonable animation smoothing...

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Finding the right 2D Engine

I spent alot of time getting Java 2D to work for my next game. There were some amazing tutorials out there, especially those done by Kevin Glass at http://www.cokeandcode.com/. However, when I did a test rendering a large screen (1024 x 768) with four parallax layers my FPS dropped to about 20. With map display optimization I could increase it to 42 but still I wanted to do a 2d engine 1900 x 1200 with a good frame rate of lets say 100. My home computer...

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