Why are only a few video games written in Java? [closed]

Answer 1

I think .NET had (has) a lot of the same perceived issues that Java has. Microsoft has just done a better job at marketing to developers with XNA :-)

Answer 2

I think John Carmack said it best with:

The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything. [...snip...] Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha. We are only testing on four platforms right now, and not a single pair has the exact same quirks. All the commercial games are tweaked and compiled individually for each (often 100+) platform. Portability is not a justification for the awful performance.

(source)

Granted, he was talking about mobile platforms, but I've found similar problems with Java as a whole coming from a C++ background. I miss being able to allocate memory on the Stack/Heap on my own terms.

Answer 3

Game marketing is a commercial process; publishers want quantifiable low-risk returns on their investment. As a consequence, the focus is usually on technology gimmicks (with exceptions) that consumers will buy to produce reliable return - these tend to be superficial visual effects such as lens glare or higher resolution. These effects are reliable because they simply use increases in processing power - they exploit the hardware/Moore's law increases. this implies using C/C++ - java is usually too abstracted from the hardware to exploit these benefits.

Answer 4

I'm playing the Sims 3, and I did some poking around. The graphics engine is C++, while the scripting and behavior engine is C#/Mono. So while C++ is there for time critical bits, other stuff like .interaction, game logic, AI is in an object oriented managed language.

Answer 5

A large reason is that video games require direct knowledge of the hardware underneath, often times, and there really is no great implementation for many architectures. It's the knowledge of the underlying hardware architecture that allows developers to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a gaming system. Why would you take the time to port Java to a gaming platform, and then write a game on top of that port when you could just write the game?

edit: this is to say that it's more than a "speed" or "don't have the right libraries" issue. Those two things go hand-in-hand with this, but it's more a matter of "how do I make a system like the cell b.e. run my java code? there aren't really any good java compilers that can manage the pipelines and vectors like i need.."

Answer 6

I'd guess that speed is still the issue. Cross platform is going to be an issue isn't it since you don't know what 3d card is available when you write the code? Does java have anything to support auto discovery of 3d capabilities? And I'd guess that there are tools to ease porting a game between the wii, xbox, and ps3, but expensive I'll bet.

The ps3 has java, via the blue ray support. Check the bd-j site.