Hi, I’m new to Java programming and game programming. I have about 1 year limited experience in programming in general, by having read a few books and having followed a few tutorials for a couple of different languages. Java turned out to be very nice in my opinion, so I just started learning it.
I am interested in eventually building a 2d point and click adventure game. I choose to program it for both the challenge, and having complete control. I have some ways to go before I get there, but I recently found out about Slick2D so I have a couple of questions.
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Is Slick2D, a library that is actually used in commercial game development?
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Is it still being developed? I found some links to a slick2d website, but it looks closed and then I found out that it is available on ninjacave.com.
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Should I be looking to use it for what I want to do or is there something else I should concentrate on?
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I heard that some people use OpenGL to render sprites to quads and after looking at some demos, I noticed immediately that the OpenGL rendered quads are very high performance and animation can be tuned to be very smooth. Does Slick2D do this? since it uses lwjgl2 I think, which is OpenGL.
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Almost the same as question 3, but to elaborate - If Slick2D is still useful and it can do what I want, should I still consider something else that is newer? and if so, what.
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I wanted to throw in a bonus question, so I don’t have to start another thread. Maybe someone can answer this? I’m learning from the ebook - Java in a Nutshell 6th Edition. I don’t want to overload myself with text, but what would be a good support book that leans toward game programming… or should I just get most other information from online tutorials. I would like to be efficient in my process in learning, and don’t want to spend unnecessarily on books that are just repetitions and so on.
…and at last, please excuse me, I don’t have a formal education in programming, so I’m trying to pull together the best tips I can.