Game Programming

I just started reading The Black Art of Java Game Programming. And I tell you what. I already have a good feeling about this book. Sure it was written in 1996 when Java 1 just came out. However by chapter 2 we are already learning about animation. Damn.

One thing that struck me as odd was that the authors of the book are young. Or more precisely they are still in school. One of these is an undergrad, and the other a grad. That does not mean they are junior. They seemed to be on the cutting edge of Java right when it came out.

This book does specialize in teaching you how to code network games. The authors believe that object oriented programming is the way to go for creating games. They are going to teach me a lot about AWT (since Swing has not been invented I guess).

Chapter 1 already got me into a lot of Java syntax. It also highly recommends you use arrays instead of lists for speed. Back in 1996, Java ran a lot slower than compiled C or C++. I also learned some basic stuff I was never taught in my Java college class. The import statement allows you to reference classes in packages. However you can still access those classes without an import by using the classes fully qualified name. I did not know that. I am excited about getting into the meat of this book. Who knows? I might be turning out some cool games in no time.

Good or Great

I have finished reading the chapter on arrays in Java. This is for my college class. In addition to the reading, I have completed each Self-Test question from the chapter. I have written Java programs to solve all the exercises at the end of the chapter. You could say that I have achieved a good understanding of the material.

Here comes the hard part. There are also a bunch of programming projects at the end of the chapter. However there are so many other things I would rather be doing. We are behind at work. I could catch up with this week's list of tasks to be completed. It is nice outside. I can do some necessary yard work. The weather also lends itself to me taking a bike ride with friends. The girlfriend wants to see a bunch of movies. She is also hungry and wants to go out to eat.

It is easy in the middle of the night to spend some time learning Java. The hard part is now when I really don't want to do any more Java programming. After all, I have reached a good enough level of understanding. What is there to gain by going further? The answer is that there is greatness to be attained. Now I am not saying that I will be a great Java developer. But in order to have a chance at greatness, I must push on now. It is absolutely required to do each and every one of the programming projects in the back of the book.

To tell the truth, greatness will also require going beyond the projects in the book. I need to code up some other programs using Java. You know. I need to implement some non trivial application using the Java programming language. Only then will I have a slight chance at possessing great Java programming skills. Let's see where this takes me.

Selection Sort

I have been reading ahead in my textbook. The next chapter is on arrays. To help learn arrays well, the textbook goes over a number of sorting algorithms. One exercise just had me implement selection sort.

Selection sort is one of the easiest sort methods. It is an in-place algorithm, requiring no extra space in a array other than one temporary variable to do swaps.

The way selection sort works is to traverse the array, and swap the current element with the smallest value from the rest of the array. It could not get any simpler. However this technique has poor performance if you have many elements in the array.

Missing Arrays

I am halfway through my college class on Java. There are a number of topics we have not covered yet. Normally that is fine, as we will eventually get to them. However I just entered a programming contest to write a Java game in 7 days. My game will be called dL1.

We have yet to cover packages, arrays, or file input/output. That is a bummer. My game will be on a two dimensional grid. That's where arrays would really come in handy. My plan is to substitute objects that references each other for arrays.

I was hoping to use some third party code to do the actual drawing for my game. So I cannot wait any more. I am reading ahead in my course book to see how to use packages. As of last night, I still had not mastered the topic. I really need to get a move on it. The contest ends in 7 days and I have one Java file which does not compile. May the Force be with me.