I've been looking at starting some game development. I know, I'm a software engineer who's spent pretty much all of his career programming for the web environment. That doesn't mean I haven't always had a desire to do game programming. It's been a sad hobby of mine since I started programming Java.
"The Black Art of Java Game Programming" was the first Java gaming book I bought many many years ago, and it still sits on my shelf - stained, battered and torn, but still a great book.
Within the last couple of years I started to pick up the hobby again and came across a great book by David Brakeen called, "Developing Games in Java". It was a great read and definitely modern day Java game programming to me in a very happy way.
So, I was very pleased to find out that David was developing a Java Animation Framework called Pulpcore. I immediately floated on over and gave it a try. I also contributed a bit by creating the Pulpcore Netbeans Module.
Everything was going along great, until one time when I wanted to create a small swing game that could be downloaded through Webstart. The issue I had was that Pulpcore is very tightly geared towards Applet development. David's created a great Javascript to go along with the Applet which does loading, and JRE checking, etc... When I asked him about why he chose to couple his framework so tightly with Applets, he just replied that he hadn't ever planned on making downloadable games with it.
That being said, the Pulpcore library is excellent! And I've learned a ton by using it. I definitely recommend anyone looking for a fast "2D rendering and animation framework" for Java, please take a look at Pulpcore!
However, since I'm more of a dabbler, and I really don't have a need to get things out there as quick as possible. I'm starting to migrate over to Scenegraph. It doesn't provide a lot of the functionality that Pulpcore has in terms of loading images, sounds and sprite management, but it gives you the tools to create your own. It also gives you the scenegraph structure, which I'm somewhat familiar with from Java3D. One great aspect of Scenegraph is that it's tied to Swing and Java2D, which means you can put it in an Applet, a Webstart application, or even into an Executable Jar file your users can download or run from a CD.
Another great fact about Scenegraph is that it is part of the JavaFX scripting language. Which is quickly becoming the talk of the town and one of my favorite languages. I urge you to take a look at the examples and demos and see for yourself just how powerful JavaFX can be. I know that the developers behind JavaFX and Scenegraph hope to not only bring you 2D animation and graphics that rival those of Flash and Silverlight, but they also hope to bring 3D into the mix. This would be awesome because you can get it all from one or two api's instead of having to switch gears.
Anyway, I'm now starting to learn JavaFX and Scenegraph and I hope to bring something to show pretty soon. I plan on creating a simple Tic Tac Toe game using Scenegraph first, and I plan on putting that process up here as I go along.
