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

Answer 1

For one thing, Java's lack of operator overloading makes all of the math you have to deal with to get a working graphics pipeline very, very annoying and hard to read.

All of the matrix multiplication and affine vectors you need to deal with are a lot easier to follow if they're in well-formed mathematical expressions rather than object-oriented expressions like

product = vector.multiply(projectionMatrix).dotProduct(otherVector);

That's just terrible. Math shouldn't look like that.

Answer 2

1. Java is slow, most of the heavy lifting is not handled by the GPU. There's still animation, physics, and AI hitting the CPU, all of which are very time-consuming.

2. Java doesn't exist on consoles, and consoles are a major target for commercial games. If you use Java on PC, you're eliminating your ability to port to consoles within reasonable time and budget.

3. Many of the more experienced coders in the game industry have been using C and C++ long before Java became popular. The two points above may contribute to this, but I expect that many professional game coders just don't really know Java all that well.

4. Someone else's point about middleware above was a good one, so I'm adding it to my answer. There's a lot of legacy code and middleware written specifically to link with C/C++, and last I checked Java doesn't have good interoperability. Using Java for most companies would involve throwing out a lot of code, much of which has been paid for in one way or another.

Answer 3

I agree with the other posts about leveraging elements of a preexisting/licensed codebase, performance, etc.

One thing I'd like to add is it's hard to pull nasty DRM tricks through a virtual machine.

Also I think there's a hubris component where project managers think they can make stable/reliable code with C++ with all the perks like having absolute control over their tools and resources, BUT without all the negatives that complicate and bog down their competition because "we're smarter than they are".

Answer 4

You can ask why web applications aren't written in C or C++, too. The power of Java lies in its network stack and object oriented design. Of course C and C++ have that, too. But on a lower abstraction. Thats nothing negative, but you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, do you?

Java also has no direct hardware access, which means you are stuck with the API of any frameworks.

Answer 5

Misconceptions about performance and poor JVM optimizations would be my guess. I say misconceptions about performance because there are some Java ports of C++ games that perform faster than their C++ counterparts (see Jake 2). The real problem, IMHO, is that many Java programmers aren't focused so much on bleeding edge performance as they are with ease of use and understandability/maintainability of code. On the C/C++ side of things you're essentially coding in a slightly higher level assembly language and its about as close to the hardware as you can get without writing in assembly or straight machine code.

Answer 6

List of game engines on Wikipedia lists many game engines along with the programming language that they are written in.

There are several Java game engines listed.

Clicking some of the links will lead you to examples of games and demos written in Java. Here's a couple:

• Ardor3D
• Bytonic Software

For certain games and situations, Java's trade-offs might be acceptable.