I want to know how java relates to other applications?

Question

I am a computer engineering student at a university. I have taken 2 pretty comprehensive courses on java, and am currently in my third. I learned no graphics applications until this course, and we are using arrays, bags, and linked lists to make hextile grids with a terrain and location.

I have been working on a board game with a few friends in college, and it works very well. I am really excited to try and make it into some form of video game. I love programming, I even switched majors from ME to CE, so if it takes a lot of extra work on my own, I will be able to do that.

So my question is, do I need to learn other forms of programming language to make a simple 2D pc game, or is java enough? Thanks a lot, I love you guys ;)

Answer 1

Other people have given you great answers, but I feel there is still more to add.



If you are not familiar with how to write a GUI in Java, study this:

http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/index.html



If you do not know how to do graphics in Java, study this:

http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/2d/index.html



The following contains several game tutorials and will educate you on how to do custom painting and timing properly for a game:

http://zetcode.com/tutorials/javagamestutorial/



Good luck in your endeavor!

Answer 2

Minecraft was written entirely in Java as far as I know. So you don't need another language. But you may want to use a third party library like lwjgl to get access to opengl graphics. For a simple 2D game that is probably not necessary though. You can just use the built in Java2D features.

http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/2d/index.html

Btw. At http://www.java-gaming.org there is a great forum for java game development.

Answer 3

Java can call other code libraries. Look at JNI and JNA interfaces one day. I have successfully used OpenCV face recognition libs written in C++ with java. Having said that, I begin any new idea I want to make software by first attacking the code with Java. Java is always open-ended and always seems to have a convenient add-on to keep the project development horizontal.



Bear in mind, if you want heldheld platforms or server-side, you have to restart with the appropriate API.



The future looks bright for games with the release of JavaFX 2.0. The promise is random-access video and the same code running handhelds, web-based and desktop apps. The holdup is a common video player for all platforms. After that Java8 should accept a variety of code languages including C#.