Project Goliath: A JavaFX Clone of Electron/BBC Zalaga Game
Aardvark produced their game Zalaga in 1984 on a 8Bit MOS derived 6502 CPU with a clock speed of 1-2MHz.Sun Microsystem's released the preview edition of JavaFX on 31st July
2008 and it works on Windows, MacOS and Linux with a pedigree of
microprocessor that matches an Intel Centrino Duo processor with a
clock speeds in the region 1.2-2.5GHz.
Dear Reader
Yours truly is very pleased to announce a new RIA Research project. It is called Project Goliath (a temporary name without doubt) and the idea is to put JavaFX through its paces by writing an exciting "shoot-em up" arcade game for it.
Aardvark's Zalaga
Throughout computing history one measure the progress by observing the complexity and sophistication of games. During the mid-1980's when I was a lad, the first computer I ever owned was an Acorn Electron. This British built machine was a cut down version of the venerable BBC Microcomputer, also built by Acorn Computers Ltd, which then spun off to a chip design manufacturer, ARM (Acorn Risc Machines ).
For the Electron/BBC there were many classic hit games produced. One of the greatest most original games of the 1980's was Elite by the eponymous David Braben and Ian Bell. There were are other tremendous games, which were based on a certain degree of flattery and plagarised concepts from arcade game machines. (Well that was one of the benefits for owning a computer back then, you did not have to borrow coins from Mum and Dad continuously in order to play Pacman.) One of the best of the "copies" was Zalaga, because it was fast, played brillaint, and had a great sound. Quite frankly, this game was superb to run on the old 8bit 6502 CPU. I spent so many hour hammering out the levels. Zalaga was based on Galaga. Aardvark's version was not a true identikit of the original, it left out some features. You can find a video of emulation of Zalaga on YouTube.
So what does Zalaga have to do with JavaFX? Well yours truly wrote about decade a clone of Defender with Java 1.1 as he was learning this new language, then. Yours truly called it Humanoid, it was a Java Applet and also ran standalone as an Application. The idea to occured me, "Why don't I do this exercise again?" to built a clone of a clone using the JavaFX runtime. This, then, is my mini research project, Goliath.
Everyone involved in computing probably might have heard of Moore's Law: the observable trend of increasing performance of microprocessors that is related to the fact the number of transistors on a microprocessor silicon chip have been doubling every two years since 1965.
Aardvark produced their game Zalaga in 1984 on a 8Bit MOS derived 6502 CPU with a clock speed of 1-2MHz.
Sun Microsystem's released the preview edition of JavaFX on 31st July 2008 and it works on Windows, MacOS and Linux with a pedigree of microprocessor that matches an Intel Centrino Duo processor with a clock speeds in the region 1.2-2.5GHz.
Goliath will be a serious of lightning video blogs, screen cast and applet demonstrations. This is a pet project for myself to push JavaFX (the preview edition) to places where I think it has not yet reached or been tested. I have a full time job and can only devote spare time to this effort on the one hand, but on the other hand one knows that writing an arcade game is a fantastic way to learn the language, get a feel for the programming and development methodology and push the boundaries. The idea is also release to a workable game.
In twenty four years things have come along enormously. We had a hardware progress, but also software advances. Back in 1984 I am pretty sure that Aardvark Software [now defunct] and other game houses would have loved to have played with Adobe Photoshop. Honestly with the greater screen resolutions, the idea of multiple composite layers, bevelling, etching, contouring, colour burning, adjustment layers, transparency and texture mapping would probably have made our heads explode with all of the possibilities. (Personally, at home I have PhotoShop CS2 and unluckily for me the JavaFX Plugins project, Project Nile, only currently works with Photoshop CS3 or better! So I will not be using Nile in this effort.) Here is a screen cast that describes how I added an extra frame to a Bug Drone alien.
Yours truly can report that JavaFx has helped write the animation easier than before. Timelines are first-class citizens of the language and writing animation of Sprites was a doodle in this program. The hard stuff is working out the meaning of SceneGraph model and the technicalities of the Affine transformation. Here is a screen cast that describes the object hierarchy. I am using NetBeans 6.1 with JavaFX Plugin to demonstrate here.
Try out the first Java Web Start example (JNLP) here. On my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop the Preview JavaFX SDK was very performant, but your mileage may various, if the graphics chip on your machine has no Direct3D or OpenGl support. I appreciated your comments, please let me know how it works for you.
