Elysian Shadows

I've been wanting to learn and start using a bit of java, just for fun. What's the best programs and really anything you guys want to tell me about the language. My intention is to design games with it, obviously, as I've seen it used in some cool applications, and it's webpage embeddability appealed to me.

For IDE's i would recommend Eclipse or Netbeans, but i would also recommend to play a little with javac(the java compiler) directly from the commandline to get an idea about what's going on behind the scenes especially if you are completely new to programming.

For game development, i haven't really been able to find any nice library for it that I like. There is LWJGL which is an OpenGL binding, and thus pretty hard to use if you don't know 3D math well, then there is Slick2D which IIRC is kinda annoying unless you wan't to use the "container" structure they provide. Lastly there is JMonkeyEngine which actually seems pretty cool, but it is an engine and not a library.

But if you are completely new to programming, you can just start learning the basics of Java. It is IMO a good language to get started with, and you can apply what you learn to many other languages. Game development is hard, so just start by playing around.

I am a sophomore computer science major and fairly adept in alot of languages, was just looking for some info on java, as i haven't covered it in college yet. I've been looking into eclipse as an ide but i'd like to know a good game library.

LWJGL. It stands for LightWeight Java Game Library, and it is what Minecraft uses.

Oh is it? ismetteren acted like it was only for OpenGL in his post, how do you know minecraft uses it?

like80ninjas wrote:how do you know minecraft uses it?

The errors when it doesn't work

Ginto8 wrote:

like80ninjas wrote:how do you know minecraft uses it?

The errors when it doesn't work

Also, if you actually go into the game's folder, you can find the lwjgl.jar file in one of the sub-folders, which I cannot remember the name nor path of...

I'm going to add another suggestion. If you want to learn java and make games in 3d then check this out:
http://env3d.org/beta/

It's something my instructor (Jason Madar) has been developing for a few years now (and it's undergoing continual improvements). We use it in our computer science classes for several exercises and there's a great set of lessons on the site. In addition, the website you see there is new (being developed primarily by another student over Christmas with some input from myself, another student, and Jason). There's a forums section where you can ask for feedback directly related to your questions, and if you have a suggestion regarding what you'd like to see in the framework it may well get implemented (he adds little things sometimes every couple of weeks).

It also has a built in module, EnvApplet, that allows it to automatically compile to a webapplet or the Env3d website. Eventual goals include: expanding advanced features like shaders, integrating framework-specific networking, and getting the framework working on Android.

Env3d is built on JMonkey, which is itself built on LWJGL.