Java: Game developement & OS X

[XxtraLarGe]

O.K., here's a big question for all of you:

I'm working on a game project for my student game developement group. Our goal is to complete a game for the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. Entries will probably be due around Jan. 1, 2003.

I wanted to make sure that the game was Mac OS compatible (OS X at least), so I figured Java is the best way to do it. I'd love to do it using Cocoa, but I'm the only Mac guy (so far). Also, I've got quite a bit of java programming experience, but I've only done Applets w/AWT & CLI Apps.

I'd like to have a full-screen stand alone app, and I'd like to have it be very high quality. If any of you were at WWDC, and you saw the game they demo'd at the intro Java session, then you have an idea of the quality of game I'm looking to make.

Will I be able to do this sort of thing using Java's AWT, BBEdit Lite & OS X's command line Java tools? I need to keep things cheap (STUDENT = POOR) and cross platform compatible.

I'm still currently in the "design" phase of the project, but want to get off to the best start when we start our coding, etc. Any suggestions as to where to start would be greatly appreciated!

[Lemming]

It's quite likely that you can do it with just those tools (assuming you have an artist with Photoshop etc. hanging around for graphics), but you might find it easier with Swing. Either way, to develop a nice-looking crossplatform game your best bet is SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/). You can do graphics with OpenGL, audio with OpenAL, SDL handles setup and input, and you can use OpenPlay if you need networking. Plus, SDL is dead easy to learn if you have any programming experience whatsoever.

You can develop SDL (at least on the Mac side) with Project Builder and probably with BBEdit+command line if you know Makefiles and compiler options.

[XxtraLarGe]

Originally posted by Lemming
It's quite likely that you can do it with just those tools (assuming you have an artist with Photoshop etc. hanging around for graphics), but you might find it easier with Swing. Either way, to develop a nice-looking crossplatform game your best bet is SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/). You can do graphics with OpenGL, audio with OpenAL, SDL handles setup and input, and you can use OpenPlay if you need networking. Plus, SDL is dead easy to learn if you have any programming experience whatsoever.

You can develop SDL (at least on the Mac side) with Project Builder and probably with BBEdit+command line if you know Makefiles and compiler options.

Thanks for the info on SDL. It looks cool, but I don't know if I'm crazy about the GPL license. Also, I don't know OpenGL (it's a 2D game anyway) or OpenAL, and I don't have a whole lot of time to invest in learning new stuff prior to working on this. What web sites would you recommend for learning Swing? I've heard of it, but don't know that much about it.

Also, I found out the name of the game I was referring to. It is called Get Amped!

p.s. I've got a couple of artists who want to help out :-)

[OneSadCookie]

SDL is under the LGPL, which means that as long as you link to it dynamically (ie. as a shared library, or as a framework on MacOSX), it's basically just free.

SDL includes its own 2D blitting routines which seem to be quite good for 2D games, but I agree that OpenGL is probably still a better graphics API :)

[RedWolf]

Swing, aka Java Foundation Classes, is the replacement for AWT. Go to the http://java.sun.com site for more info.

OS X supports J2SDK 1.3.1 so you have a recent JDK to work with. You'll have to wait for Jaguar to use J2SDK 1.4.