Killer Game Programming in Java

Java 3D Strengths

The core strengths of Java 3D are its scene graph, its performance, collection of unique features, the fact that it's Java and can call upon an enormous number of support packages and APIs, and its extensive documentation and examples.

The Scene Graph

The scene graph has two main advantages: it simplifies 3D programming and accelerates the resulting code. The scene graph hides low-level 3D graphics elements and allows the programmer to manage and organize a 3D scene. A scene graph supports many complex graphical elements.

At the Java 3D implementation level, the scene graph is used to group shapes with common properties, carry out view culling, occlusion culling, level of detail selection, execution culling, and behavior pruning, all optimizations that must be coded directly by the programmer in lower-level APIs. Java 3D utilizes Java's multithreading to carry out parallel graph traversal and rendering, both useful optimizations.

Performance

Java 3D is designed with performance in mind, which it achieves at the high level by scene graph optimizations and at the low level by being built on top of OpenGL or DirectX Graphics.

Some programmer-specified scene graph optimizations are available through capability bits, which state what operations can/cannot be carried out at runtime (e.g., prohibiting a shape from moving). Java 3D also permits the programmer to bypass the scene graph, either totally by means of an immediate mode, or partially via the mixed mode. Immediate mode ...