Java is working well for us. It is saving time because we are able to
highly leverage off of already existing components primarily Java3D, and as
a whole the grammer is less defect prone. This is probably the reaction you
will get from a Java3D mailing list. So I should elaborate:
One reason I like Java is an allergic reaction to 'franken code' and
associated horror stories. My last team built a game entirely in C++ - we
had to build garbage collection, run time type identification and integrate
a platform independent version of the STL library (SGI). We had to build
platform independent makefiles and use platform independent C++ compilers
(GCC). All peripheral services, networking, databases, event handling
system, html browser had to be written from scratch. We wrote our
visualization layer from scratch, buttons, gadgets, windows, 3d scene graph
in order to get platform independence - DirectX and Direct3D were sublayers
underneath this platform independent layer. All these preliminaries took
months. It was only then after this frankenstein had been stitched together
and jolted into life that we started to make the game, its physics, and high
level entity behaviors. And after all that we ended up writing a small
procedural typesafe scripting language anyway so that we could ship
behaviors over the net...
Today, we're using Java and Java3D, and we've covered the same ground in
weeks. Our performance metrics show that Java3D does perform poorly
compared to how custom tailored systems can perform, but we can live with
that. We will use the development time savings to optimize - writing more
efficient scene culling, precaching assets which cause transient bogs in
the system performance, minimizing spontaneous garbage collection etcetera,
changing the opengl.dll to either a custom one or a toned down version.
Java3D compares favorably to other scenegraphs, and also one point of note
is that there is simply no other option in terms of a fully fledged
scenegraph - Farenheit (the SGI/Microsoft effort) is still early, and we're
reluctant to use other scenegraphs such as say Surrender since we want to
release our code for free.
- Andy
-----Original Message-----
From: Danielle Rousy Dias da Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, May 11, 1999 11:21 AM
Subject: [java3d] Games in Java3d
>
>Hello,
>
>I am working at a game project and I would like to know about
>development tools like java3d/java and c++/directX. What are the
>advantages and disadvantages of each one? Which one is the best?
>
>Thanks in advantage,
>
>Danielle.
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
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