Here here! It's always nice to see a post from David. I usually find he's excellent at putting things into perspective. When developing a game, the rendering engine is only a small part of the process. It should not be the central focus. Gameplay is often sacrificed in favor of eye candy. Some game developers seem to think that it's all about the "wow" factor.
As far as using direct OpenGL bindings vs. Java3D go, my own opinion is that if you're only concerned about speed-speed-speed, then stop using Java and break out your old ASM books. Years ago it was said that games could only be written in ASM to get the necessary speed. Later, C programmers said it was impossible to write games in C++ because it was too slow. Now those same C++ programmers are saying Java is too slow. My question is "too slow for what?" I'd hardly say that a cribbage game requires the latest hardware. And look at the work FullSail has done with their HUMID engine. That should shatter a lot of myths. Unfortunately, there's not a long list of titles one can actually touch on one's own machine. Roboforge is the only one I can think of at the moment. I once read somewhere someone's description of the differences between Java3D and OpenGL. It may have been in the specification -- I can't remember. If the application you're going to write was like building a house, then Java3D would be like going to the lumber store and buying boards, tiles, windows and so on. You still have to do the work to make something with it. With OpenGL, it's like being given an axe and shown the forest. There's a lot of work to do before you can start building. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Yazel, David J." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 6:52 AM Subject: [JAVA3D] Java3d /JOGL /ETC > I posted this to the Javagaming site, but thought I should post this here > also. > <snipped for brevity> =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
