Development Environment

As the title of the blog suggests, I'm going to limit the selection here to Java. This may be controversial, but I think that the language has matured to the point where it's a viable choice for pretty much every style of game.

So, what are our choices?

1. Plain JDK
2. Eclipse
3. Netbeans

#1, while not impossible, is going to get real old, real fast. It's a good thing to know how to compile at the command line, and in general what is going on behind the scenes, but people spent thousands of hours writing IDEs for a reason! You'll still need to download and install this unless you're in an environment where it's provided already (e.g. OS X)

#2 was until recently my choice, but a few longstanding issues (massive memory usage, no profiler under OSX, occasional unresponisveness) have led me to abandon it in favour of ...

#3 Netbeans. Sun's own IDE is great. Easy to use and responsive, it has a built in form designer and subversion support. This blog will assume you've chosen to use Netbeans when giving detailed instructions, although everything is still possible in Eclipse.

Now on to the second word of the blog title: OpenGL. GL implementations in Java have been through a few iterations, but now pretty much stabilised thanks to JOGL.

Download the jogl development package for your platform and unzip it somewhere you'll remember. There are two steps to perform to use JOGL in your Netbeans project - the CLASSPATH and the LIBRARY_PATH. Detailed instructions for each platform are on the jogl site, but as ever there is more than one way to skin a cat. Once we have created a project, we can reference the jogl jar files as a library in either Eclipse or Netbeans to solve the CLASSPATH problem, and pass an argument to the virtual machine to solve the LIBRARY_PATH problem. Let's do that in the next post.