[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 6 ■ The Foundation of Game Design: The JavaFX Scene Graph and the InvinciBagel Game Infrastructure
Now, it is time for the final testing of the top-level UI part of your game application to make sure that all the UI
button elements (objects) function properly and do what you have designed (coded) them to do. After that, you will be
running the NetBeans 8.0 Profiler again to ensure that the Scene Graph hierarchy that you have just created is indeed
leaving 99 percent of the available CPU processing power for the game engines that you will be creating from here on.
Testing the Final InvinciBagel UI Design
Again, click the green Play arrow at the top of NetBeans IDE 8.0, and run your project. This will bring up the windows
demonstrated in Figure 6-12. As you can see, when you click the Legal and Credits button UI element, the overlay
makes a seamless composite with the InvinciBagel artwork backplate, as shown on the left-hand side of the figure,
and when the High Scores button UI element (control) is clicked, the high scores table background is put in place,
as displayed on the right-hand side of the figure. As you can see, the classes from the javafx.image package provide a
pristine result with regard to compositing
Figure 6-12. The other two Image objects shown composited, using the background plate and compositing ImageViews
Next, let’s take a look at how many CPU cycles are being taken up by the Scene Graph implementation that you
have coded in this chapter, as you want to ensure a 100 percent static, top-level UI design so that the only dynamic
elements used in your game are the game play engine (and related engines) themselves. Because the traversal of the
Scene Graph hierarchy by the pulse resolution engine can get “expensive,” you need to be very careful here!
Remember that your primary objective is to create a top-level UI design for starting the game play screen
and loop, while also implementing a UI that allows your users to display the instructions, legal disclaimers, and
production credits and take care of setting up an area to use for displaying the high scores table. At the same time,
you are tasked with saving 99 percent of the processing power for use later on, for processing the game logic, sprite
movements, sprite animation, collision detection, scoring, and physics via the JavaFX pulse engine.
Profiling the InvinciBagel Scene Graph for Pulse Efficiency
It is important that the game UI design not take any processing power away from the CPU, as the game engine is going
to need all of it. As Figure 6-13 reveals, you can use the Profile > Profile Project (InvinciBagel) menu sequence to
run the Profiler and take a screenshot of the CPU statistics for the current (top-level UI) application.
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