[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 4 ■ An Introduction to JavaFX 8: Exploring the Capabilities of the Java 8 Multimedia Engine
Prism bridges the powerful 3D game engines (DirectX, OpenGL) that are on the major OS platforms as well as on
consumer electronics (embedded) devices so JavaFX 8.0 can offload complex rendering task processing to graphics
processing unit (GPU) hardware from NVIDIA (GeForce), AMD (ATI Radeon), and Intel. This makes JavaFX (and thus
Java 8) games faster and allows games to use less CPU processing power for rendering game assets to the screen. This
in turn allows more CPU processing power be used for game play logic, such as AI and collision detection. You will be
learning about these areas of game design after you master the JavaFX engine in this fourth chapter of the book.
It is important to note that game developers do not need to understand the inner workings of the Quantum
(threading), Glass (windowing), or Prism (rendering) engines to be able to take advantage of their amazingly powerful
features. Throughout the book, you are going to be focusing on the top level (Scene Graph and Scene Builder) as
well as the JavaFX and Java 8 API levels of the diagram. I will also be covering the NetBeans IDE 8.0 level, which you
learned about in Chapter 2 but which you will also be exploring much further during the remainder of this book.
As for the lower levels of the diagram, NetBeans 8.0 will generate a Java bytecode file that is read by the custom
JVM for each of the OS platforms. The JVM, illustrated at the bottom of the figure, can be installed for any given OS
platform by downloading a Java 8 JRE, which you already encountered in Chapter 1, when you installed it as part
of Java JDK 8.
This JVM layer lets your game be installed as an application across all popular OS platforms as well as on
embedded devices, which are also moving to support JavaFX 8. Furthermore, you can generate your Java 8 game as a
Java applet, which can be embedded in a web site, and there is even a deployment model, in which the application
can be dragged out of the web site and onto your desktop, where it is installed as a full-fledged Java 8 application.
In addition, there is already a way to run JavaFX 8 applications on iOS 8, and Android 4.4 and 5.0. If you are
interested in the latest information on this, simply google “JavaFX on Android,” or “JavaFX on iOS,”; you can bet that
by 2015, Android 5.0 and Chrome OS devices will be running JavaFX applications “natively,” meaning that you will
someday (soon) be able to export Java (and JavaFX engine) applications directly to Android 5.0, using IntelliJ, or to
Chrome OS, using NetBeans 8.0. You should eventually be able to “code once, run everywhere” with this Java 8 and
JavaFX 8.0 dynamic duo! Oracle recently released Java 8 SE Embedded, Java 8 ME and Java 8 ME Embedded versions,
all of which support JavaFX.
■ ■Note The JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA is now the official IDE used for creating 64-bit Android 5.0 applications. This
IDE is examined in my Android Apps for Absolute Beginners, 3rd Edition (Apress, 2014), which covers developing 32-bit
Android 4.0 applications, using an Eclipse IDE and Java 6, and 64-bit Android 5.0 applications, using an IntelliJ IDEA
and Java 7.
Let’s start at the top of the diagram, and take a look at the JavaFX Scene Graph and the javafx.scene package,
which implements Scene Graph in the JavaFX API (you will look at Scene Builder in the next chapter).
JavaFX Scene Package: 16 Core Java 8 Classes
The first thing I want to do after our high-level overview is present one of the most important JavaFX packages, the
javafx.scene package. In Chapters 2 and 3, you discovered that there is more than one JavaFX package. As you saw
in Chapter 3 (see Figure 3-1), the InvinciBagel game application uses four different JavaFX packages. The javafx.
scene package contains 16 powerful Java 8 classes (remember, JavaFX was recoded in Java 8), including the Camera,
ParallelCamera and PerspectiveCamera, Cursor and ImageCursor, LightBase, PointLight, and AmbientLight
classes; the Scene Graph classes (Node, Parent, Group, and SubScene); and some utility classes (see Figure 4-2).
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