[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

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Chapter 5 ■ An Introduction to Game Design: Concepts, Multimedia, and Using Scene Builder Because a WAVE or AIFF file will not have any quality loss (as there is also no decompression needed), the PCM data can be placed straight from the JAR file into system memory! This makes PCM audio great for game sound effects that are short in duration (0.1 to 1 second), and it can be highly optimized, using 8-bit and 12-bit sample resolution and 8kHz, 22kHz, or 32kHz sample frequency. Ultimately, the only real way to find out which audio format supported by JavaFX has the best digital audio compression result for any given digital audio data is to encode your digital audio in the primary codecs that you know are supported and efficient. I will be outlining this work process later on, when you add audio to the game, and you will observe the relative data footprint results between the different formats, using the same source audio sample (see Chapter 15). Then, you will listen to the audio playback quality so that you can make your final decision concerning the optimal balance between quality and file size . This is the work process that you will need to go through to develop JavaFX digital audio assets for use in your Java 8 game. JavaFX also supports the popular MPEG-4 AAC codec. These digital audio data can be contained in MPEG4 containers (.mp4, .m4a, .m4v), or file extensions, and can be played back using any OS. It is important to note that JavaFX does not contain an MPEG-4 decoder, but instead supports what is called a multimedia container, meaning that JavaFX uses the OS’s MPEG-4 decoder. For this reason, and because online listening studies have concluded that the MP3 format has better quality (for music) than the MP4, you will be using the MP3 format for longer-form audio (game background musical loops) via the Media and MediaPlayer classes. You will use the PCM WAVE audio format for short-form (1 second or less) audio (game sound effects, such as shots, bells, yelps, grunts, laughter, cheering, and other such digital audio assets), which you will use via the AudioClip digital audio sequencing engine (class) that JavaFX so generously provides. Digital Audio Optimization: Start with CD-Quality Audio, and Work Backward Optimizing your digital audio assets for playback across the widest range of hardware devices on the market is going to be easier than optimizing your digital video or digital imagery (and thus animation) across these devices. This is because there is a much wider disparity between target screen resolutions and display aspect ratios than there is between types of digital audio playback hardware support across hardware devices (with the possible exception of new hardware featuring 24-bit HD audio playback hardware compatibility). All hardware plays digital audio assets well, so audio optimization is a “one audio asset hits all devices” scenario, whereas with the visual (video, image, animation) part of the equation, you have display screens as large as 4,096 × 2,160 pixels (4K iTV Sets) and as small as 320 × 320 pixels (flip phones and smart watches). It is important to remember that the user’s ears cannot perceive the same quality difference with digital audio that the user’s eyes can with digital imagery, 2D animation, and digital video. Generally, there are three primary “sweet spots” of digital audio support across all hardware devices that you should target for support for Java game audio. Lower-quality audio, such as short narration tracks, character exclamations, and short-duration sound effects, can achieve remarkably high quality by using a sampling rate of 8kHZ or 22kHz, along with 8-bit or 12-bit sampling resolution. Medium-quality audio, such as long narration tracks, longer-duration sound effects, and looped background (ambient) audio, can achieve a very high quality level by using a 22kHz or 32kHz sampling rate, along with a 12-bit or 16-bit sampling resolution. The high-quality audio assets, such as music, should be optimized approaching CD-quality audio and will use a 32kHz or 44.1kHz sampling rate, along with the 16-bit data sampling resolution. For HD-quality audio, being at the ultra-high end of this audio spectrum, you would use the 48kHz sampling rate, along with the 24-bit digital audio data sampling resolution. There is also an unnamed, “somewhere in the middle” high-end audio specification, using a 48kHz sampling rate, along with a 16-bit data sampling resolution, which just happens to be what Dolby THX used to use for its high-end audio experience technology in movie theaters (back in the day). Ultimately, it comes down to the quality–file size balance results that emerge from the digital audio data footprint optimization work process, which can be amazing. Therefore, your initial work process for optimizing your digital audio assets across all these hardware devices is going to be to create baseline 16-bit assets, at either 44.1kHz or 48kHz, and then optimize (compress) them, using the different formats supported in JavaFX. Once that work process is completed, you can see which resulting digital audio assets provide the smallest data footprint, along with the highest quality digital audio playback. After that, you can reduce your 44.1KHz or 48kHz data to 32kHz and save www.it-ebooks.info 119
Chapter 5 ■ An Introduction to Game Design: Concepts, Multimedia, and Using Scene Builder that out ,using first 16-bit and then 12-bit resolution. Next, reopen the original 48kHz data, downsample to 22kHz sample frequency, and export that, using 16-bit and 12-bit resolution, and so on. You will be performing this work process later on, when you add digital audio assets to the Java 8 game, so you will see the entire process (see Chapter 15). Next, let’s take a look at JavaFX Scene Builder and how it uses FXML to allow designers to design Java FX applications visually. I am not going to be using Scene Builder or FXML (just Java 8 code and JavaFX classes) over the course of this book, so pay attention! JavaFX Scene Builder: Using FXML for UI Design JavaFX Scene Builder is a visual design tool that generates an FXML (JavaFX markup language) UI Scene Graph construct to define your JavaFX application’s front-end design. This FXML UI definition can then be “inflated” in Java 8 to create your application’s JavaFX Scene Graph, nodes, groups, and SubScene objects filled with javafx. scene.control package classes (objects) defining your UI design. Oracle’s intention in offering both a Scene Builder visual development tool and FXML is to allow nonprogrammers, ostensibly UI designers, to design the front-end UIs for their Java 8 applications so that the Java programmers can then focus on back-end functional application task processing logic. Because FXML and Scene Builder are optimized for UI design (arranging controls, such as buttons, text entry fields, radio buttons, check boxes, and so on), I am not going to use Scene Builder and FXML over the course of this book. I am, however, going to cover it in this chapter so that you know how to use it if you want to for your other JavaFX applications. My reasoning is that, other than the initial game splash screen, which contains a few UI Button objects, which show game instructions, list the contributors, track the high scores, save a current game state, and start game play, UI design will not be a major focus of this book. To use FXML, and soon after use of the Scene Builder visual UI design tool, you must create a special kind of FXML application, as you learned in Chapter 2 (see Figure 2-4), when you created the JavaFX game. Creating an FXML application imports the javafx.fxml package and classes. This allows the Java 8 code to inflate FXML constructs created by the UI designers so that they can be used by the programmers to attach Java logic to the various UI controls. The Android OS does this as well, using basic XML, but in Android this approach is not optional; it is part of the way things are done. In JavaFX 8 (as you saw in Figure 2-4), it is simply one option. If you want to research XML-based UI design further for Android, check out my book Pro Android UI (Apress, 2014). The Scene Builder visual layout tool that writes FXML UI design constructs for you is a WYSIWYG drag and drop interface design tool. All a designer has to do is drag and drop any of the JavaFX UI controls onto the editing screen from a UI Control panel that contains every Control class (object) in the javafx.scene.control package (see Chapter 4). This Scene Builder is integrated into NetBeans 8.0 for easy access and integration with JavaFX, in case programmers also need to use it to quickly prototype UI designs for their clients. There is also a stand-alone version of the Scene Builder tool, at version 2.0, for designers who do not want to work inside the NetBeans IDE. You can switch back and forth from FXML editing and previewing in real time and see UI design and layout changes without having to compile the Java application. You can also apply all CSS styles to the Scene Builder tool and FXML structure in real time and see the results of those coding changes as well, again, without any Java compilation! In addition, you can add custom UI controls to the UI Control panel library, using third-party JAR files or FXML definitions. The Scene Builder Kit API is open source. This lets you customize your own integrations of Scene Builder’s UI panels and controls, allowing you to integrate Scene Builder into other IDEs, such as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. A rich text TextFlow container has recently been added into the GUI component (Control) library, affording rich text– editing capabilities. With these new capabilities, you can build multiple-node, rich text constructs that can integrate other UI elements, or new media element types, with the TextFlow elements. For you 3D “aficionados,” 3D is also fully supported in the Scene Builder visual design editor and in FXML. A 3D object can be loaded and even saved out using the Scene Builder tool, and all of the object’s properties can be edited (and viewed) in real time, using the Inspector panel. It is not yet possible to create from scratch 3D objects using Scene Builder, and you cannot yet assign or edit complex Mesh or Materials properties at this time, but I am sure that these features will come, along with the advanced 3D OpenGL ES power that is scheduled to be added into JavaFX 8. 120 www.it-ebooks.info
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Contents at a Glance About the Auth
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Introduction The Java Programming L
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■ Introduction In Chapter 13 you
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Chapter 1 ■ Setting Up a Java 8 G
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Chapter 2 Setting Up Your Java 8 ID
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Chapter 2 ■ Setting Up Your Java
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Profiling Your Java 8 Game Applicat
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Chapter 3 ■ A Java 8 Primer: An I
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Chapter 10 Directing the Cast of Ac
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Chapter 12 Setting Boundaries for Y
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Chapter 15 Implementing Game Audio
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Chapter 15 ■ Implementing Game Au
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Chapter 17 Enhancing Game Play: Cre
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Chapter 17 ■ Enhancing Game Play:
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■ index Background image (cont.)
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■ index InvinciBagel animation (c
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■ index Modifier keywords access
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Beginning Java 8 Games Development
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This Java 8 Game Development book i
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■ Contents NetBeans 8.0 Is User I
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■ Contents ■■Chapter 5: An In
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■ Contents Creating a Hero Superc
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■ Contents Organizing the .update
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■ Contents Optimizing the Scene G
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About the Author Wallace Jackson ha
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Acknowledgments I would like to ack
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