What This Book Is Not About | Killer Game Programming in Java

I'm not going to spend 200 pages explaining classes and objects, inheritance, exception handling, and threads. Many books do that already. A good Java introduction is Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. It's won awards and can be downloaded at http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/.

You won't find any large games here, such as a complete FPS or a multiplayer fantasy world. Describing one of those in detail would require hundreds of pages. Instead, I focus on the building blocks for games (e.g., reusable elements such as loaders, and algorithms such as A* pathfinding). Shooting in a 3D world is described in Chapters 23 and 24, and Chapter 32 explains a simple multiuser 3D space.

I've reduced the quantity of code listings; you won't find page after page of undocumented code here. The documentation uses modern visual aids, including UML class diagrams, sequence diagrams, state charts, and 3D scene graphs.

The 3D material concentrates on Java 3D, because it's a high-level 3D API using a stable and well-documented scene graph. Java has alternative ways of programming 3D applications, including JOGL, LWJGL, Xith3D, jME OpenMind, and more. I'll discuss them in Chapter 14, at the start of the Java 3D coverage.

I won't be talking about J2ME games programming on mobile devices. It's an exciting subject, especially now that a mobile 3D API is available (for example, in the J2ME Wireless Toolkit v2.2, http://java.sun.com/products/j2mewtoolkit/). Unfortunately, this book is groaning at the seams, and something has to be left out. For those interested in J2ME games programming, I suggest J2ME Games with MIDP2 by Carol Hamer (but, it doesn't cover the 3D API, which is too new). I've written several chapters on the API, which can be downloaded from this book's web site at http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/.

This is not a games design text, a topic deserving its own book or two. Two I like are Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris, and Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford.

If you prefer online sources, the following sites are full of gaming articles, reviews, and opinions:

Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/)
GameDev.net (http://www.gamedev.net/)
flipCode (http://www.flipcode.com/)
IGDA, the International Game Developers forum (http://www.igda.org/Forums/)