Advanced Java Game Programming

This book is one of the Game Development Classics series, written by American developer David Wallace Croft and translated by Peng Hui, and published in Chinese by Tsinghua University Press in 2005 (the original was published by Apress). The book is aimed at developers who already have a Java foundation and wish to use newer Java language features and APIs to build complex 2D games for the Web and desktop. The author uses a reusable open-source animation library as the main thread, progressing chapter by chapter: starting with setting up the development environment and code library and compiling the sample game, then introducing a deployment framework adaptable to multiple platforms and animation thread management; next, explaining a Swing-based animation engine and a general animation library (scene management, Sprites, etc.); then moving to advanced graphics techniques such as hardware-accelerated graphics, multi-buffering, and full-screen exclusive mode; followed by persistence mechanisms for loading and saving game data in different deployment environments, object-oriented game architecture, and the implementation of the A* pathfinding algorithm. The latter half focuses on networked games: within the security restrictions common to Java games, it uses mechanisms such as HTTP tunneling, polling, and Pulling to achieve data transmission and synchronization between server and client; the sample networked game can run in a simple servlet container. The book provides numerous illustrations, source code, and sample games that readers can directly modify, recompile, and use in their own projects, with an appendix containing reference materials. The book has 11 chapters and about 425 pages.