New user, and some questions

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I’m new to the forums, but not all that new to the realm of game development.
However, I havent’ use Java extensively, especially recently, for this.

My latest project, which is hardly underway at this point, is an online Bomberman clone, that will allow for users to create/join games, and will have stat tracking on the website.
I’m hoping to make it WebStart deployable, since I know most users are adverse to downloading installation packages, and it also makes cross-platform distribution very easy.

I guess what I’m here to ask, is how to go about approaching a project like this in Java.
Currently, the project is pretty simple. I have very very basic placeholder graphics, and I have the graphics engine finished. I also have a map loader that displays a very crude map from a file, and a moving character :stuck_out_tongue:
I figure that before I tackle the networking aspect, I should get a working local prototype going, so that’s mainly my first goal. My main worry is the general networking integration, and the WebStart integration.
Is there any special way I should be setting up my project or resources so that I can easily port it over to WebStart without recoding a lot of things? I want to avoid that as much as possible, if I can.

Also, any other tips on the general development flow of this project would be greatly appreciated :slight_smile:

Also, as a side question, does anyone know of any decent freeware graphics that would work well in a project like this? It’s entirely 2D, so I’m hoping some stuff is out there. My graphics skills are terrible, essentially I can resize things and make them transparent, and that’s pretty much my limit :smiley:

#2

There are many available framework which I don’t use but that can be easily adopted as far as I tried to.
To my knowledge there are Slick2D, LWJGL, JIGA (better for J2ME) and basically JAI/JIIO brought to open source by the Sun community. I only use JAI/JIIO because of the scalable character of the Sun Community. LWJGL seems to be the fastest approach to a game library. :smiley:

#3

Is there any special way I should be setting up my project or resources so that I can easily port it over to
WebStart without recoding a lot of things?

-all resources should be in jar files
-load stuff via getResourceAsStream
-always use ‘/’ and never ‘’ (in paths)
-always use lowercase file extensions

#4

Slick is written on top of LWJGL. Other 2D oriented libraries for Java include:

GTGE
GAGE
EasyWay
SPGL
JASEL
Stencyl
TSR (the scripting raid)
JGame

Apologies if I missed any. I’m very much of the opinion you should try all of them (that you can) and try writing your own.

Oh, and what Onyx said.

Kev

#5

How useful do you guys thinks these libs are? I’ve gotten to the point where I have a very fast 2D rendering engine that now supports collision detection as well. My graphics are still terrible, since I can’t find any good free sprites that are easy to adapt :stuck_out_tongue:

#6

If you already have a 2d rendering engine with sprite collisions, you probably don’t need to download any of the libraries mentioned. It’s fairly easy to add music and sound if you have a modern java game programming book.

Finding artwork is a whole different issue.