Games Java UPD

Why aren't many commercial, 3D video games (not random open source 2D ones) written in Java? In theory, it makes a lot of sense: you get a productivity boost and a cross-platform application almost for free, among other things, such as the vast amount of Java libraries, and built-in garbage collection (although I admit I'm not sure if the latter is a good thing). So why is it rarely used? I can only think of a couple popular commercial games written for the Java platform.

Games Java

Finally, it's rare for games to be written in 100% C++ anyway - a lot is done using scripting languages, whether they're custom or just integrating an existing languages (Lua being one of the more popular ones these days).

As far as garbage collection is concerned, that can be a bit of a problem. The problem is not so much that it exists, it's more how it works - the garbage collector MUST be non-blocking (or at least be guaranteed to only block very briefly), since it's simply unacceptable to have the game freeze for 10 seconds while it scans all the allocated memory to see what can be freed. I know Java tends to choke quite a bit in GC'ing when it's close to running out of memory (and for some games out there, it will).

This doesn't mean these languages don't have their place in game development - and no, I'm not just referring to tool programming. For most games, you don't need that extra bit of performance you get from C++, including 3D games, and if you're writing it all from scratch, it can make perfect sense to use something like XNA - in fact, there's a good chance it will.

The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything. [...snip...] Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha. We are only testing on four platforms right now, and not a single pair has the exact same quirks. All the commercial games are tweaked and compiled individually for each (often 100+) platform. Portability is not a justification for the awful performance.

any productivity boost from Java ishypothetical. The syntax is almostidentical to C++ so you're reallyjust banking on savings from memorymanagement and standard libraries.The libraries have little to offergames developers and memorymanagement is a contentious issue dueto garbage collection.

One of the biggest reasons Java and other Virtual Machine languages are not used for games is due to Garbage Collection. The same thing goes for .NET. Garbage collection has come a long ways and works great in most types of applications. In order to do garbage collection though, you do need to pause and interrupt the application to collect the trash. This can cause periodic lag when collection happens.

A large reason is that video games require direct knowledge of the hardware underneath, often times, and there really is no great implementation for many architectures. It's the knowledge of the underlying hardware architecture that allows developers to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a gaming system. Why would you take the time to port Java to a gaming platform, and then write a game on top of that port when you could just write the game?

edit: this is to say that it's more than a "speed" or "don't have the right libraries" issue. Those two things go hand-in-hand with this, but it's more a matter of "how do I make a system like the cell b.e. run my java code? there aren't really any good java compilers that can manage the pipelines and vectors like i need.."

Sure there may be some .NET games (which ones ? I'm interested. Are there some really CPU/GPU-intensive ones ?), but I guess it's more because lot of people are experts in MS technologies and followed Microsoft when they launched their new technology.

Oh and cross-platform just isn't in the mind of video games companies. Linux is just around 1% of market, Mac OS a few % more. They definitely think it's not worth dumping Windows-only technologies and librairies such as DirectX.

Misconceptions about performance and poor JVM optimizations would be my guess. I say misconceptions about performance because there are some Java ports of C++ games that perform faster than their C++ counterparts (see Jake 2). The real problem, IMHO, is that many Java programmers aren't focused so much on bleeding edge performance as they are with ease of use and understandability/maintainability of code. On the C/C++ side of things you're essentially coding in a slightly higher level assembly language and its about as close to the hardware as you can get without writing in assembly or straight machine code.

Actually, it is very possible for managed code to do 3d games, the problem is the back engines. With .Net, for a brief period, there was a Managed DirectX wrapper to DirectX 9 by Microsoft. This was before the abstraction that is now XNA.

Unfortunately, on the Java side, it is seriously lacking - mainly for the reason that DirectX isn't available for Java, and games programmers know and understand the DirectX api - why learn yet another api when you will be returning to DirectX?

Game marketing is a commercial process; publishers want quantifiable low-risk returns on their investment.As a consequence, the focus is usually on technology gimmicks (with exceptions) that consumers will buy to produce reliable return - these tend to be superficial visual effects such as lens glare or higher resolution.These effects are reliable because they simply use increases in processing power - they exploit the hardware/Moore's law increases.this implies using C/C++ - java is usually too abstracted from the hardware to exploit these benefits.

I'd guess that speed is still the issue. Cross platform is going to be an issue isn't it since you don't know what 3d card is available when you write the code? Does java have anything to support auto discovery of 3d capabilities? And I'd guess that there are tools to ease porting a game between the wii, xbox, and ps3, but expensive I'll bet.

Anyway, modern 3D games in fact do use higher level languages. Often, you'll find the game logic written in languages like Lua or Python. But the core (I/O, threads, task scheduling) of the typical 3D game will be written in low level languages for the next 25 years or as long devices do not allow abstraction and virtualization by themself (which will come).

I hope you understand now why people use C/C++ instead of Java in games, imagine Crysis in Java, there would not be any computer in this world which could handle that... + Garbage collection works ok for Widgets which just destroyed an image but it's still cached in there and needs to be cleaned but not for games, for sure, u will have even more lags on every garbage collection activation.

And to add, no, Java for gaming is still an awful idea. Just a few days ago a big company that I will not name started rewriting their game client from Java to C++ because a very simple game(In terms of Graphics) was lagging and heating i7 Laptops with powerful nVidia GT 5xx and 6xx generation video cards(not only nVidia, the point here is that this powerful cards that can handle on Max settings most of the new games and can't handle this game) and the memory consumption was 2.5 - 2.6 GB Ram. For such simple graphics it needs a beast of a machine.

I have scoured the internet, but there are not very many resources for Java game development, not nearly as many as C++. In fact, most engines are written in C++. I tried to play a game made with jMonkeyEngine, but the game was terribly slow, to the point where my computer froze. I had no other Java applications running, and nothing too resource intensive. In contrast, my computer can play most modern 3D games with ease. If I continue to learn and improve Java now, and it turns out that later I am required to learn C++, making the switch might be difficult.

Yes it is, check this list for a proof. Those are some games made with Java using The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL). It is a low-level framework, which provides OpenGL for high quality graphics and OpenAL for sounds. It also provides input API. With these you can quite easily get started to serious game development in Java.

I am currently writing my second 3D game as a hobby project in Java, and I just love it. In the past I used to write my games with C++, but after switching to Java there is no going back. Supporting multiple operating systems with Java can be very easy, for example my previous Java game, which I developed in Windows for a year, worked in Linux right away and in OS X with only one bug without any need to compile anything on those platforms.

I have never observed any non-indie game which spent significant time in a language that was not compiled to native code prior to execution, and even the indie games which do so are a rarity. So my belief right now is that it simply cannot be done.

Gameplay over graphics is a viable choice, and you can see it in the success of games like Terarria and Minecraft. But if you intend on creating srs graphics, then it's not going to be doable in Java.

Probably the very things that turns you off from C++ (low level memory management, no garbage collector, having to pay attention to pointers, structs as arrays etc) are the very things that you should learn if you want to exploit a computer's resources most efficiently. Your games will run best if you are exploiting the computer's resources most efficiently.

I'm looking to build real-time games built using a dedicated Java server and iphone clients as well as Java desktop clients. What available high-performance network transport libraries that could be used for real-time multiplayer game development, exist for Java and iphone (specifically reliable UDP)?

The general advice for most real-time action based games (Counter-Strike, Left4Dead, Quake III) is to use UDP/IP transport protocol sending messages as "unreliable" packets in favor of the "guaranteed" delivery of TCP (because of issues with resend and latency issues you can't easily control). 041b061a72