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We recently finished our session at devoxx on “JavaFX Games”, for all you you who have attended or read our previous post and played the game, here is the source.
Enjoy!
We are excited to see all your cool physics experiments and games so please post links in comments.
We just finished our talk here at Devoxx called “Gaming JavaFX”. The talk was scheduled for Friday morning and we wanted to do something really fun and a bit lighthearted, but also really practical. Earlier this week James Gosling had a talk about the Java Store, and we wanted to provide some momentum to the idea that you can write really fun and interesting games in JavaFX and then load these up into the store.
Jasper posted a preview teaser earlier in the week of our Dude with a bomb. You’ll appreciate watching the talk at Parley’s when they have it posted (or you can pay Parley’s a few quid and see the talk even earlier).
The game we wrote is called “Dueling Dudes”. Its a non-scrolling side shooter, not unlike some other popular games like Scorched Earth or iShoot. Except we decided to replace the tanks and earth with dudes and boxes. We placed it in a warehouse and gave each box & barrel physical properties, and gave our dudes weapons and the ability to bash the terrain around. It was tremendous fun. I once read that every programmer should write a game at least once a year just for fun and to keep that youthful exuberance. I couldn’t agree more.
Technically it was a very pleasant and fun thing to work on as well. Integrating the physics engine was not very much work, and using a scenegraph to model things was very natural. We drove things mostly from the engine and a few well placed binds and a single Timeline which drove the world. Jasper pretty well wrote the whole thing over 3 days. Here was our secret equation for success:
We’ve hosted the game here at FXExperience, hope you enjoy playing it (and if you have troubles on your machine configuration we’d like to know that too!).
In a couple hours Jasper and I will be presenting a talk titled “Enterprising JavaFX” at Devoxx. The main purpose of the talk is to describe how to use JavaFX for writing enterprise application content. Here’s a quick teaser screenshot of one of the apps we’re going to describe:
Jira Dashboard Application
We’ll be writing some additional blog posts over the next few weeks describing various tips n’ tricks as to how we used web services in this app, how we wrote the custom list cells, and so forth.
Come see a cool new game we have written on the current JavaFX release and learn how we wrote it. We’ll even post a link to play it online, though I might have to save that till the end otherwise all I will hear in the room are explosions coming from every laptop.
Gaming JavaFX
with Jasper Potts & Richard Bair
Firday 20th Nov 9:30am
at Devoxx
For those unlucky few who are not attending Devoxx this year, you will be missing many great things. We will post the game and some blogs about it over the next couple weeks and the recorded talk will be available early next year online as a video.
Hope to see you there 🙂
Gluon offers industry-leading solutions for mobile and cloud, as well as professional Java and JavaFX consultancy.
FX Experience is maintained by Jonathan Giles.
