Update on Java/OpenGL Demos

Posted by Mark at October 8, 2004 01:29 PM

Over the past two years I've been exploring graphics in Java and looking for a simple flexible platform to create high-performance graphics.

Recently I'm leaning towards a game approach to coding, a simple take-over-the-computer approach: fullscreen rendering, grab every cpu cycle available, no threads, just one loop that manages events and rendering, and use OpenGL to talk to the video hardware.

I've been working with LWJGL (http://lwjgl.org), a low-level OpenGL binding for Java that is geared toward game developers. The transition from pure Java to java/openGL was surprisingly straightforward and the performance was a big plus. Some unexpected benefits: coding time drops because OpenGL actually works as documented, there are no gui/threading issues to work out, I completely dropped out awt/swing so quirky gui-related bugs go away, code size shrinks since OpenGL handles many aspects of rendering that I was doing in Java. Drawbacks: can't show the work online without plug-ins, but after 8 years caught in the crossfire of browser wars, I'm okay with requiring that folks download the piece and run locally.

I developed a few OpenGL demos and created a utility class that makes my life much easier and may be of some use to others. Demos with code are here:

http://potatoland.com/code/gl

and screenshots of some of the graphic qualities I'm going for are here:

http://potatoland.com/whotel
http://potatoland.com/kk2
http://potatoland.com/kk2/kk3_1

I'm excited by the results I'm getting from OpenGL and Java, so I'm passing this on with the hope that other digital artists may benefit from it.

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