LWJGL or Slick or Java2D

General Discussions
#1

I guess I’m looking for forum courage (have enough liquid courage at home). So after spending a week revamping my website, I’m going to work on my third java game. It will be another applet of course. I’ve read quite a bit that even for 2D games I should probably be using a 3D engine.

There are somethings that I don’t like that much about Java2D. The biggest probably is that I can’t really get high framerates in an attempt to smooth things out. And I really want a sound engine that I can just play stuff and not worry about it causing problems or slowing things down.

So should I move over to LWJGL or Slick or stay with Java2D and just get another one done. I’ve seen some very, impressive demos on slick and I trust the coders who made it yet like most engines it doesn’t seem to have a large following.

As has been pointed out, JOGL seems a little ify. LWJGL seems the most popular yet Slick seems right down my 2D alley. My guess it will take a week or two just to get the environment set up and figure out how to get stuff working.

Is there anything specific that my next game Dingo needs? Probably not. I’ll just be using collision detection, keyboard inputs, map editor, maybe some lighting and particle effects depending on how easy to implement. Maybe some path finding but I don’t think I need anything near a*.

I know what Orange will say. :stuck_out_tongue: Any thoughts?

#2

Slick seems like the obvious choice here :), well you want a to make a fast hardware accelerated 2d game right?

You could go with LWJGL but then you’d probably just end up reinventing most of slick, Slick is basically just a 2d library on top of LWJGL.

Another good option you could choose is pulpcore http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/

#3

Thanks for the response. I love milpa and looked over pulpcore but for some reason it just seemed really complicated for me. But again I’m not the best coder in the world.

#4

The thing to do with PulpCore is start to look at all the demos, get them running, and play with editing the code. There’s a ton of functionality packed in there, so there’s definitely a bit of complexity, but once you “get” it, it all makes perfect sense, arguably more than most engines do. The fact that you can animate almost any numerical property in the engine is fantastically powerful (by which I mean you can tween values, set up timelines for values, loop them, rewind them, etc.).

The downside is that it’s not entirely trivial to get up and running with it, but that’s true about any of the options, what with build scripts and launchers and whatnot to contend with.

But PulpCore still uses software rendering (though it does it very well), so if you’re looking for pure graphical throughput, you’ll want one of the HW accelerated options.

#5

Hi!

JOGL is not dead (you should read this as you’re interested in applets and I assume you don’t like security popups) and maybe you could give a look at JGame :
http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/jgame/

However, I have to admit that Slick is better and more often maintained than JGame.

#6

gouessej, your first link is horribly borked.

#7

No it isn’t. Several games have been written with JGame, it is even compatible with J2ME, it can use JOGL optionally, the author is preparing a new release since some months.

#8

No, no - he meant the link is “borked” as in, try clicking on it - it doesn’t work.

#9

Easy to fix it http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,20435.msg166308.html#msg166308

#10

Ok I fixed it :slight_smile: Thanks.

#11

Thanks for all the replies.

I think I’m going to try Slick for now. It did take 3 hours to get it up and running (haven’t got the applet working yet) but I do like the acceleration. So far there is a bit of a learning curve but not so steep. I’ll put up my WIP in a week or so.

#12

I like Java2D because no one has to turn over full control of their computer to run an online game.

#13

But it turns out that JOGL doesn’t require permissions which is pretty cool…

#14

That’s quite awesome.

#15

Does it means that by default, if you are running a JOGL application, this application has access to all your computer resources or you can still chose to just run it in the sandbox?

#16

No, it just means that you can use JOGL APIs without signing your applet. Grr.

Cas :slight_smile:

#17

this was AFAIK always the case. Now users with 6u10 or later can run your JOGL applet/webstart app without a security dialog since JOGL was signed with an cert which is apparently on the JRE’s whitelist.

#18

That’s so unfair to LWJGL.

That’s like including Internet Explorer on Windows. Perhaps LWJGL team can sue Sun for killing the competition for giving JOGL an advantage.

ehe…he

#19

Or maybe ask sun if they can white list the LWJGL cert :smiley:

// Json

#20

Maybe, maybe not.