Anyone know of any good tutorials for 3D games in Java? I know Java pretty well (having worked with it for 3 years) but haven’t done anything in this area before.
Thanks,
- Matt
Hm, difficult, … wait a while and you can take FlyingGuns as a tutorial… its going to be OpenSource
Hey. I’m the same as you, although I have only been working on Java for 10 months, I’ve been working on it as part of my University Comp Sci course. I never knew that boring XML node traversal would actually work out being useful!
I’ve used the Java 3D Jump-Start book to get me up to speed, and it’s very good indeed. I feel very confident about the theory of J3D. Unforunately, it does kind of leave you high and dry just when things start to get interesting. It hand-holds you through making a scene and such, but just when it seemed like the perfect book, it gives up when you’d like to be able to make the scene start doing things!
I’ve managed to pull myself through to a point where I’ve got an object following a spline path (the J3D examples package is quite invaluable, you’ll need to download that yourself if you’re on Mac OS X), but there are a lot of gotchas on the way that you really aren’t told about, (like the universe seems to be limited to the size of your bounding spheres, and I had a nightmare with alpha objects last night) and a lot of things where you try and guess what the best thing is to do (like dynamic movement, I’m doing it with tweening interpolators in a Flash type way. Might not be the best way).
If anyone could recommend a book which explains this stuff well if would be invaluable to you (and me!), the Interweb doesn’t pull up much unfortunately…
I wrote a thing with some of the j3d gaming related stuff that I really wanted to find when I was getting started- you can find it here - hopefully it is a bit of useful to you.
I’ve writen several demos using the java3d api showing different effects such as cubic environment mapping, per pixel lighting, cloth and flag simulations, water simulation, flexible particles system, collisions demo, simple shadows etc…
Unfortunately I’m away from home for few weeks of vacation abroad, however I’ll put them all online on my ftp as soon as I get back to Massachusetts…
Stay tuned 