Dawn of the Geeks

Software Rendering is all about creating Wolfenstein 3D clones in a variety of languages. The most recent incarnation is “Bunnies” in Java. It features lighting, floors and ceilings on top of the standard walls and objects that most clones contain.

I’m working on a web-based map editing tool and discovered something: Java tanks as soon as you have too many different textures. And by too many I mean a few dozen 64×64 pixel textures. When I download the map information to load with the applet and there are more than few dozen textures the frame rate tanks and it occasionally becomes non-responsive.

When I download a map with just a few tiles, the game runs just fine.

So in conclusion, no, Java can’t handle the memory or number crunching required to run a computationally expensive game. Which is fine actually. The Java version of Bunnies is complete. This next set of tutorials in this project will be using C#. We’ll see how well it handles. I suspect it will do about as well as the C++ version except this time around the code is more optimized, less buggy and does more.