Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The most important new media engine below the Quantum Toolkit is the
Prism
(game) engine, which renders 2D content, using
Java 2D
, and 3D content, using either
OpenGL
(Mac, Linux, Embedded OSs) or
DirectX
if your users are on the Windows
Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8.1 platform. Windows XP support was discontinued in
April 2014, as most computers and consumer electronics devices out now are 64-bit
capable (XP was 32-bit only).
Prism bridges the powerful 3D game engines (DirectX, OpenGL) that are on the
major OS platforms as well as on consumer electronics (embedded) devices so JavaFX
8.0 can
offload
complex rendering task processing to
graphics processing unit
(
GPU
)
hardware
from NVIDIA (GeForce), AMD (ATI Radeon), and Intel. This makes
JavaFX (and thus Java 8) games faster and allows games to use less CPU processing
power for rendering game assets to the screen. This in turn allows more CPU process-
ing power be used for game play logic, such as AI and collision detection. You will be
learning about these areas of game design after you master the JavaFX engine in this
fourth chapter of the topic.
It is important to note that game developers do not need to understand the inner
workings of the Quantum (threading), Glass (windowing), or Prism (rendering) engines
to be able to take advantage of their amazingly powerful features. Throughout the
book, you are going to be focusing on the top level (
Scene Graph
and Scene Builder)
as well as the JavaFX and Java 8
API
levels of the diagram. I will also be covering the
NetBeans IDE 8.0 level, which you learned about in
Chapter 2
but which you will also
be exploring much further during the remainder of this topic.
As for the lower levels of the diagram, NetBeans 8.0 will generate a Java
bytecode
file that is read by the custom JVM for each of the OS platforms. The JVM, illustrated
at the bottom of the figure, can be installed for any given OS platform by downloading
part of Java JDK 8.
This JVM layer lets your game be installed as an application across all popular OS
platforms as well as on embedded devices, which are also moving to support JavaFX 8.
Furthermore, you can generate your Java 8 game as a Java
applet
, which can be em-
bedded in a web site, and there is even a deployment model, in which the application
can be dragged out of the web site and onto your desktop, where it is installed as a full-
fledged Java 8 application.
In addition, there is already a way to run JavaFX 8 applications on iOS 8, and
Android 4.4 and 5.0. If you are interested in the latest information on this, simply
google “JavaFX on Android,” or “JavaFX on iOS,”; you can bet that by 2015, Android
5.0 and Chrome OS devices will be running JavaFX applications “natively,” meaning
that you will someday (soon) be able to export Java (and JavaFX engine) applications
