I''ve made some simple games in Java (A pong game using graphics from Dragonball Z being the only interesting one...)
And I started work on a tactical RPG similar to Final Fantasy Tactics.
However, my hard drive crashed and I lost it all. I decided it was about time I learn DirectX anyway, so I''ve just recently finished Andre Lamothe''s book and I''m preparing to restart work on the game in Win32 code.

Java CAN be used to makes games (even 3D ones, no texture mapping however...). I''ll give you a book''s title which I own that was pretty good:
"The Black Art of Java Game Programming" (this book is sorely out of date, still using Java 1.0.2, but a lot of the ideas are good and transfer to Java 1.1 easily enough (I never learned Java 2...so I don''t know how easily they''d go to that.) It covers a few points about making a 3D game that uses flat shaded polygons and comes with all the source necessary to do so (and an example game using the 3D library).

So in conclusion : Yes, Java can be used to make games, but if you want to do anything on par with commercial games you will have to go to C++.

I''d like to make one note : Java is NOT as cross-platform as people think. My code that I had would not compile on Unix, because Java is still a very new technology and it has bugs (hell, check the JDC and you''ll see that the bug submission #s when you submit one are above 4,000,000!). Making a game in Pure Java is extremely difficult and often isn''t worth the effort. I mean, so what if your java game runs on linux or BeOS, how much of the market actually uses those and ONLY those operating systems? Enough to worry about? I don''t think so. Not yet anyway.


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