Actually, java is becoming much faster than it was before. It still isn''t as fast as complied code, but the JVM''s are much better. Right now I am working on writing a multi-player game and both the Server and Client is written in java. I thought I would need to rewrite the Server in C but it seams to work fine under heavy use. It doesn''t use graphics on the server side, so the AWT overhead isn''t there. By the way, Symantec''s Visual Cafe is great!

If you can''t win, make sure the one that beats you breaks the record!

The participants of the Java Game Development thread on this board are putting together an FAQ on the topic. We have more questions than answers right now, but some of the information may be useful to you.

http://games.cpbinc.com/FAQ/

Lets think about the speed issue for a minute. Wing Commander was written for a low-end 386 (say a 33MHz 386). Doom was written for a low to mid range 486. Microsoft Flight simulator ran decently on a 486 as well. Great games like Civilization and Railraod Tycoon ran fine on a 286.

These days, CPUs are on the order of 10-20x faster (not just in terms of clock rate, but in terms of cycles per instruction, including multiple execution units that work simultaneously). So is Java on a 300MHz machine really all that slow? Assuming the hardware is twenty times faster than what was used to write Civilization, and assuming that Java is 10x slower than C++, you''re still ahead. When you stop and think that most novice games tend to be of the "Tron lightcycles" or "Tetris" variety, then the answer is, yes, Java is way more than enough.