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

Answer 1

.NET definitely has some of the same issues that Java has when it comes to intense 3D performance. Microsoft has also invested a lot more time and money in the development of the libraries when it comes to working with 3D heavy operations.

(...personally, I also think they had a leg up when it comes to the magic between DirectX and .NET)

Answer 2

Actually, it is very possible for managed code to do 3d games, the problem is the back engines. With .Net, for a brief period, there was a Managed DirectX wrapper to DirectX 9 by Microsoft. This was before the abstraction that is now XNA.

Being given total access to DirectX api's, .Net games work a treat. The best example I know of is www.entombed.co.uk, which is written in VB.Net.

Unfortunately, on the Java side, it is seriously lacking - mainly for the reason that DirectX isn't available for Java, and games programmers know and understand the DirectX api - why learn yet another api when you will be returning to DirectX?

Answer 3

Even games written on the .Net platform are often highly optimized for speed like direct access to memory and bus. .Net allows to use C / C++ and mix it with higher level languages such as C#.

Game development studios often work close together with hardware vendors, which do provide access to low level interfaces of their products. This is a world, where you have to use ASM and C for device communication. A virtual environment would slow down these program parts.

Anyway, modern 3D games in fact do use higher level languages. Often, you'll find the game logic written in languages like Lua or Python. But the core (I/O, threads, task scheduling) of the typical 3D game will be written in low level languages for the next 25 years or as long devices do not allow abstraction and virtualization by themself (which will come).

Answer 4

Runescape by Jagex is written in Java, the "video game" tag might not specifically apply it being an on-line game, but it does have a decent following.