[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 5
An Introduction to Game Design:
Concepts, Multimedia, and Using
Scene Builder
In this chapter, you will build on your knowledge of the JavaFX multimedia engine by learning about the optimal way
to use the scene graph paradigm in JavaFX and take a look at JavaFX Scene Builder tool and FXML, and why
(or why not) to use these in certain types of Java game development scenarios. You will also examine basic game
design optimization concepts, and the types of games, as well as game engines, that are available for the Java platform,
including physics engines, such as JBox2D and Dyn4J, and 3D game engines, such as LWJGL and JMonkey. Finally,
you will consider the new media concepts that you will need to understand to integrate digital imaging, digital audio,
digital video, and animation into your game production pipeline. We will also look at some of the free open-source
multimedia production tools that you installed back in Chapter 1, and can now use to create Java 8 games.
First, you will revisit the underlying concept of static (fixed) versus dynamic (real time), which was covered in
Chapter 3 (constant versus variable) and Chapter 4 (pulse) and which is one of the foundational principles of game
optimization. This is important, because you will want your game to run smoothly across all the different platforms
and devices that are used to play it, even if the device only uses a single processor (which is actually rare these days,
with most devices featuring dual core (two processor) or quad core (four processor) CPUs).
Next, you will study the concepts, techniques, and lingo of game design, including sprites, collision detection,
physics simulation, background plates, animation, layers, levels, logic, and AI. You will also examine the different
types of games that can be designed, and how they differ from each other.
Then, you will explore the role that multimedia assets play in today’s visually (and aurally) impressive games. You
will learn about the principles of digital imaging, digital video, and animation as well as digital audio, as you will be
using many of these new media asset types over the course of the book, and will need this foundational knowledge to
be able to work with them.
Finally, you will take an in-depth look at the bootstrap JavaFX application code that you generated in Chapter 2
and at how the Java .main() method and the JavaFX .start() method create the primaryStage Stage object, using the
Stage() constructor method, and, inside that, create a Scene object named scene, using the Scene() constructor
method. You will look at how to use methods from the Stage class to set the scene, title the stage, and show the stage
as well as how to create and use StackPane and Button class (objects) and how to add an EventHandler to a button.
www.it-ebooks.info
101