[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 6 ■ The Foundation of Game Design: The JavaFX Scene Graph and the InvinciBagel Game Infrastructure
Figure 6-14. Profiling the Scene Graph UI design thus far to make sure that it does not use any perceptible thread
overhead
Java 8 and its JavaFX engine spawned nearly a dozen threads, so your game application is already highly
multithreaded, and it does not even need to be at this point in time! The teams at Oracle are working diligently at
making JavaFX the premier game engine, so the performance just keeps getting better and better, which is great news
for Java 8 game developers!
Summary
In this sixth chapter, you got your hands dirty doing the actual top-level UI design for your game as well as outlining
the underlying game engine component design and figuring out the most efficient Scene Graph node design. Then,
you got back into Java 8 game programming and redesigned your existing bootstrap Java 8 code, originally created by
NetBeans 8.0.
Because this NetBeans-generated Java code design was not optimal for your purposes, you rewrote it completely
to make it more organized. You did this by creating two custom Java methods,.createSplashScreenNodes() and
.addNodesToStackPane(), to modularize the Scene Graph node creation process as well as the adding of the three
Parent (and leaf) Node objects to the Scene Graph root (in this case, the StackPane object, which you are using for its
multilayer UI object-compositing capability).
Next, you learned about some of the JavaFX classes for implementing these new methods, including the Pos class
and the Insets class, from the javafx.geometry package; the Image and the ImageView class, from the javafx.scene.
image package; the HBox class, from the javafx.scene.layout package; and the TableView class, from the javafx.
scene.control package. You coded the new .createSplashScreenNodes() method, which instantiated and configured
the HBox object, using the Insets object, and then the Image and ImageView objects and the four Button objects.
Once all these Scene Graph nodes were instantiated and configured, you wrote an .addNodesToStackPane() method
to add Node objects to the StackPane root object so that they would be displayed by the Stage object, which references
the Scene Graph’s root object. Next, you tested your top-level game application UI design. Then, you added in the last
couple of Image objects and added ActionEvent EventHandler program logic. Finally, you profiled the application to
make sure it was efficient.
In the next chapter, I will present the JavaFX pulse engine and the AnimationTimer class so that you can create
the infrastructure for your Java 8 game engine, which will process your game events in real time.
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