   Java for Gaming?
  First let me say Hello!I've been hovering around the site for some time now, but this is my first post here.Anyways, I'm actually an artist, not a programmer, but, due to the number of times I've tried making games, both with friends, and across the internet, I've decided to learn how to program, so I can work on my own to make small games. Don't worry, I'm not saying that I'm going to singlehandedly make a game that will replace WoW or Call of Duty. Right now I am working on learning Java. What I was wondering what is the best way to take my basic Java knowledge, and apply it to game programming, again, at a basic level, as up until now, all I have done is art. Thank you,Peter --------------Website: www.peterslatteryart.blogspot.comDailies: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peter-Slattery-Dailies/122575981150562?ref=ts   
  First you will need to learn the fundamentals and actually understand them, don't go ahead of yourself because you will get lost. When you are confident with the fundamentals of the language then you can start adapting your style to suit what you want to be able to do, in your case games programming. This will probably involve graphics, do some research into libraries that suit the kind of game you want to make and then simply get Java to display a triangle. Then when you have that nailed you can start moving on to move complicated things such as 3D objects and getting input. Learning programming is not easy and at times it may seem very repetitive and boring but you have to follow through. Hope this helps ;  Welcome destructivArts, I am positive Java is a very viable gaming platform right now, especially if you stay at simple games. It buys you a lot of flexibility and portability. Some people complain that "it is slow". Perhaps it is too slow to run God Of War 3, but for simple apps, the performance loss is acceptable in my opinion.   ;Welcome destructivArts, I am positive Java is a very viable gaming platform right now, especially if you stay at simple games. It buys you a lot of flexibility and portability. Some people complain that "it is slow". Perhaps it is too slow to run God Of War 3, but for simple apps, the performance loss is acceptable in my opinion.Actually I think you'll find that Java is very fast. Java was at one time slow, but updates to the Java virtual machine have increased its performance by many, many times over. In fact, the Java VM is so fast that it is a suitable platform for a complete in-software 3D engine (http://www.jpct.net/) using no native code.   ;  Indeed, Java has come a long ways since its inception. Used well, it should be nearly as fast, or possibly as-fast, as well-written, native code. The language itself is perhaps not as nice as some, and some of its decisions force you into a certain way of coding, but performance-wise, modern Java is certainly a viable platform.MineCraft is written in Java and while it may look blocky and primitive (by design), it is certainly a computationally-expensive application. If Java, today, can handle MineCraft, then the Java of today and tomorrow are probably capable of whatever you can dream up.   ;Welcome destructivArts, I am positive Java is a very viable gaming platform right now, especially if you stay at simple games. It buys you a lot of flexibility and portability. Some people complain that "it is slow". Perhaps it is too slow to run God Of War 3, but for simple apps, the performance loss is acceptable in my opinion.People stopped complaining about Java being slow around 2002. Today, Oracle's JVM is *the* most advanced general purpose virtual machine in existence.Today they complain that the client-side APIs are just horribly dated and are a decade behind time in terms of visual experience and deployment. It lacks friendly and ubiquitously supported 3D API or anything beyond the most rudimentary multimedia facilities, such as sound. Oracle has no need for those.Java is kind of business apps. It's like COBOL. Language is fine, but the supporting infrastructure is vastly lacking.A beginner especially will have to deal with all the absurdities of deployment, decade-long unfixed bugs in OGL and utterly unfriendly APIs for game-like stuff.It can be done, it is being done, but of all the alternatives (Unity3D, XNA, Flash), Java would likely be the last on the list.Learning programming is not easy[/quote]Using something that is specifically designed for games, rather than CRUD business apps does make it easy. There really are better choices. I'm actually an artist, not a programmer,[/quote]USE FLASH.It was made for you.