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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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tombert·

Out of curiosity, has anyone here tried taking something like Quake 2 or 3 and porting it to run on the JVM?

This project kind of makes me want to try porting Quake 3 into Clojure, but I want to know the limitations in doing so.

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https://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

Oh neat; I'll have to look at this tonight....thanks!

Jake2 is what Google used (+ GWT) to get Quake2 in the browser as one of the more impressive early WebGL demos:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/quake2-gwt-port/

I'd imagine the graphics libraries is where the JVM falls down.

Not that Minecraft runs well or is a marvel of graphical technology but at least it proves you can do FPS 3D with the JVM enough to the the most popular game around.

Minecraft uses https://www.lwjgl.org/

Cant one bind to opengl directly ?

Yes you can. Java works fine for even kinda high end 3d graphics, not many people do it though.

The biggest thing in java gamedev is avoiding GC pauses.

I would think that with the newer GCs (like Shenandoah) for Java, the GC pause thing might become a non-issue soon enough. Not sure that works for Clojure though.

Hmm, how would a different GC _not_ work for a different JVM language (Clojure or Jython, or whatever)?

I kind of misspoke; Clojure has had difficulties in past supporting the latest versions of the JVM; it's possible that it works ok with Shenandoah...admittedly I haven't tried it yet.

Allocation patterns.

Languages like Clojure stress more the GC.

Java is even one of the managed languages that already has Vulkan bindings.

Java history is full of OpenGL and DirectX bindings as well.

Just not all of them have survived the original authors leaving the project.

Before Unity was a thing, Java already had the Java Monkey Engine.

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