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Me and my friend started developing a game just like Zelda for SNES using Java. The only problem is that we don't know what to use: our very own engine with AWT or if we could use SWING to make it easier.

So.. the short question is:

For soft java-2d games, is it a good or a bad idea to use Java Swing?

And WHY?

Consider that the game is not "heavy". Thanks in advance!

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    Bad: Because you'll just being re-doing all the work someone else has already done (for a 2d game library, perhaps one that uses Swing internally) :-) Swing aimed to replace AWT -- not to be a game library. Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 5:10
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    The final boss should be JButton ;) Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 5:32

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I have attempted this a few times and found that:

  • If your graphics are all unrotated (or quadrant-rotated) sprites and fixed or tiled background images, it is usually fast enough.
  • If you need to rotate images or draw geometric shapes (with Graphics2D), forget it. It can slow to a crawl with just 20-30 polygon vertices on the screen. If you do a lot of rotation & scaling then you are probably better off with a 3D framework, even for a 2D world.

If you do choose swing, learn to use the BufferStrategy class.

Also consider PulpCore.

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While you could use the Java awt and swing libraries to build a game, you would probably have an easier time finding a game-specific library and building around that. Processing is a great choice, especially for beginners. http://processing.org/

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