Why are only a few video games written in Java

Question

Why aren t many commercial  3D video games  not random open source 2D ones  written in Java  In theory  it makes a lot of sense  you get a productivity boost and a cross-platform application almost for free  among other things  such as the vast amount of Java libraries  and built-in garbage collection  although I admit I m not sure if the latter is a good thing   So why is it rarely used  I can only think of a couple popular commercial games written for the Java platform   Is it because of performance  If so  wouldn t most of the heavy lifting be done by the GPU anyway

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I agree with the other posts about leveraging elements of a preexisting/licensed codebase, performance, etc.

One thing I'd like to add is it's hard to pull nasty DRM tricks through a virtual machine.

Also I think there's a hubris component where project managers think they can make stable/reliable code with C++ with all the perks like having absolute control over their tools and resources, BUT without all the negatives that complicate and bog down their competition because "we're smarter than they are".

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Even games written on the  Net platform are often highly optimized for speed like direct access to memory and bus   Net allows to use C   C   and mix it with higher level languages such as C    Game development studios often work close together with hardware vendors  which do provide access to low level interfaces of their products  This is a world  where you have to use ASM and C for device communication  A virtual environment would slow down these program parts   Anyway  modern 3D games in fact do use higher level languages  Often  you ll find the game logic written in languages like Lua or Python  But the core  I O  threads  task scheduling  of the typical 3D game will be written in low level languages for the next 25 years or as long devices do not allow abstraction and virtualization by themself  which will come

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Actually  it is very possible for managed code to do 3d games  the problem is the back engines  With  Net  for a brief period  there was a Managed DirectX wrapper to DirectX 9 by Microsoft  This was before the abstraction that is now XNA   Being given total access to DirectX api s   Net games work a treat  The best example I know of is www entombed co uk  which is written in VB Net   Unfortunately  on the Java side  it is seriously lacking - mainly for the reason that DirectX isn t available for Java  and games programmers know and understand the DirectX api - why learn yet another api when you will be returning to DirectX

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One of the biggest reasons Java and other Virtual Machine languages are not used for games is due to Garbage Collection  The same thing goes for  NET  Garbage collection has come a long ways and works great in most types of applications  In order to do garbage collection though  you do need to pause and interrupt the application to collect the trash  This can cause periodic lag when collection happens   Java has the same problem for realtime applications  When tasks must run at a specific time  it is hard to have an automated task such as garbage collection respect that   It is not that Java is slow  It is that Java is not good at handling realtime tasks

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I think John Carmack said it best with      The biggest problem is that Java is really slow  On a pure cpu   memory   display   communications level  most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced  With Java  on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4 77 mhz IBM PC  and lousy control over everything        snip       Write-once-run-anywhere  Ha  Hahahahaha  We are only testing on four platforms right now  and not a single pair has the exact same quirks  All the commercial games are tweaked and compiled individually for each  often 100   platform  Portability is not a justification for the awful performance     source   Granted  he was talking about mobile platforms  but I ve found similar problems with Java as a whole coming from a C   background  I miss being able to allocate memory on the Stack Heap on my own terms

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I d guess that speed is still the issue   Cross platform is going to be an issue isn t it since you don t know what 3d card is available when you write the code   Does java have anything to support auto discovery of 3d capabilities   And I d guess that there are tools to ease porting a game between the wii  xbox  and ps3  but expensive I ll bet   The ps3 has java  via the blue ray support   Check the bd-j site

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Performance issue is the first reason  When you see the kind of hyper optimized C   code that are in the Quake engines   http   www codemaestro com reviews 9    you know they re not gonna waste their time with a virtual machine   Sure there may be some  NET games  which ones   I m interested  Are there some really CPU GPU-intensive ones     but I guess it s more because lot of people are experts in MS technologies and followed Microsoft when they launched their new technology   Oh and cross-platform just isn t in the mind of video games companies  Linux is just around 1  of market  Mac OS a few   more  They definitely think it s not worth dumping Windows-only technologies and librairies such as DirectX

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Game marketing is a commercial process  publishers want quantifiable low-risk returns on their investment  As a consequence  the focus is usually on technology gimmicks  with exceptions  that consumers will buy to produce reliable return - these tend to be superficial visual effects such as lens glare or higher resolution  These effects are reliable because they simply use increases in processing power - they exploit the hardware Moore s law increases  this implies using C C   - java is usually too abstracted from the hardware to exploit these benefits

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Runescape by Jagex is written in Java  the  video game  tag might not specifically apply it being an on-line game  but it does have a decent following

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I think  NET had  has  a lot of the same perceived issues that Java has   Microsoft has just done a better job at marketing to developers with XNA  -

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Java is slow  most of the heavy lifting is not handled by the GPU   There s still animation  physics  and AI hitting the CPU  all of which are very time-consuming  Java doesn t exist on consoles  and consoles are a major target for commercial games   If you use Java on PC  you re eliminating your ability to port to consoles within reasonable time and budget  Many of the more experienced coders in the game industry have been using C and C   long before Java became popular   The two points above may contribute to this  but I expect that many professional game coders just don t really know Java all that well  Someone else s point about middleware above was a good one  so I m adding it to my answer   There s a lot of legacy code and middleware written specifically to link with C C    and last I checked Java doesn t have good interoperability   Using Java for most companies would involve throwing out a lot of code  much of which has been paid for in one way or another

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You can ask why web applications aren t written in C or C    too  The power of Java lies in its network stack and object oriented design  Of course C and C   have that  too  But on a lower abstraction  Thats nothing negative  but you don t want to reinvent the wheel every time  do you   Java also has no direct hardware access  which means you are stuck with the API of any frameworks

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Misconceptions about performance and poor JVM optimizations would be my guess  I say misconceptions about performance because there are some Java ports of C   games that perform faster than their C   counterparts  see Jake 2   The real problem  IMHO  is that many Java programmers aren t focused so much on bleeding edge performance as they are with ease of use and understandability maintainability of code  On the C C   side of things you re essentially coding in a slightly higher level assembly language and its about as close to the hardware as you can get without writing in assembly or straight machine code

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Are there any good ports of gaming engines libraries   Many C C   developers  particularly the ones on Windows  where most commercial games are written  are familiar with Visual Studio  There is no comparison in IDEs  In general  Java has been sold to businesses because of it s solid typing and it has a perception of not having memory management issues   And yes  Java still suffers from a perception that it is slow  and it s memory management is poor  and for games  it probably is ill-suited to the task  As stated in some of the other answers  garbage collection just isn t going to cut it when you are dealing with real-time high-performance requirements  Video games push CPUs and GPUs to their limits

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NET definitely has some of the same issues that Java has when it comes to intense 3D performance  Microsoft has also invested a lot more time and money in the development of the libraries when it comes to working with 3D heavy operations       personally  I also think they had a leg up when it comes to the magic between DirectX and  NET

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Minor points first    any productivity boost from Java is hypothetical  The syntax is almost identical to C   so you re really just banking on savings from memory management and standard libraries  The libraries have little to offer games developers and memory management is a contentious issue due to garbage collection  cross-platform  for free  is not as good as you think because few developers want to use OpenGL and several key platforms probably lack a good Java implementation or wrappers for their native libraries  whether for graphics  audio  networking  etc    But mainly  the issue is backwards compatibility  Games developers moved to C   from C and to C from assembly purely because the migration route was smooth  Each interoperates closely with the previous  and all their previous code was usable in the new language  often via a single compiler  Therefore migration was as slow or as fast as you liked  For example  some of our old headers in use today still have  ifdef WATCOMC in  and I don t think anybody has used the Watcom compiler here in a decade or more  There is a massive investment in old code and each bit is only replaced as needed  That process of replacing and upgrading bits and pieces from one game to the next is nowhere near as practical if you changed to a language that doesn t natively interoperate with your existing code  Yes  C   Java interoperability is possible  but very impractical by comparison to simply writing  C with a bit of C    or embedding asm blocks in C   To properly supercede C   as the game developers  language of choice  it must do one of two things    Be easily interoperable with existing legacy code  thus preserving investment and maintaining access to existing libraries and tools  OR Demonstrably show up-front enough of a productivity boost that the cost of rewriting all your own code  or reworking the interfaces into reusable components that can be used from that language  is more than covered    Subjectively  I don t think Java meets either of those  A higher-level language might meet the 2nd  if someone is brave enough to be the pioneer   EVE Online is probably the best example we have of Python being usable  but which uses a fork of the main Python language  many C   components for performance  and even that is for a fairly undemanding game in modern terms

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It was talked about it a lot already  u can find even on Wiki the reasons      C C   for the game engine and all intensive stuff   Lua or Python for scripting in the game   Java - very-very bad performance  big memory usage   it s not available on Game Consoles It is used for some very simple games Yes  Runescape counts in here  it s not Battlefield or Crysis or what else is there  just because there are a lot of programmers that know this programming language    C  - big memory usage It is used for some very simple games just because there are pretty much programmers that know this programming language     And I hear more and more Java programmers that try to convince people that Java is not slow  it is not slow for drawing a widget on the screen and drawing some ASCII characters on the widget  to receive and send data through network And it is recommended to use it in this cases network data manipulation  instead of C C       But it is damn slow when it comes to serious stuff like math calculations  memory allocation manipulation and a lot of this good stuff   I remember an article on MIT site where they show what C C   can do if u use the language and compiler features  A matrix multiplier 2 matrices   1 implementation in Java and 1 implementation in C C    with C C   features and appropriate compiler optimisations activated  the C C   implementation was  296 260 times faster than the Java implementation   I hope you understand now why people use C C   instead of Java in games  imagine Crysis in Java  there would not be any computer in this world which could handle that      Garbage collection works ok for Widgets which just destroyed an image but it s still cached in there and needs to be cleaned but not for games  for sure  u will have even more lags on every garbage collection activation   Edit  Because somebody asked for the article  here  I searched in the web archive to get that  I hope you are satisfied   MIT Case Study  And to add  no  Java for gaming is still an awful idea  Just a few days ago a big company that I will not name started rewriting their game client from Java to C   because a very simple game In terms of Graphics  was lagging and heating i7 Laptops with powerful nVidia GT 5xx and 6xx generation video cards not only nVidia  the point here is that this powerful cards that can handle on Max settings most of the new games and can t handle this game  and the memory consumption was  2 5 - 2 6 GB Ram  For such simple graphics it needs a beast of a machine

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List of game engines on Wikipedia lists many game engines along with the programming language that they are written in   There are several Java game engines listed   Clicking some of the links will lead you to examples of games and demos written in Java   Here s a couple    Ardor3D Bytonic Software   For certain games and situations  Java s trade-offs might be acceptable

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The game development world is a funny one  On one hand  they re often quick to accept new ideas  on the other hand  they re still in the stone age   The truth is  there s rarely that much incentive in switching to  NET Java anything other than C C      Most game companies license parts of the game engine from other companies  These parts are written in C    and although you might have access to the source so you could port it  that takes a lot of effort  and of course  the license needs to allow it    Also  a lot of legacy code already exists in C    If code from previous projects can be reused  say  if you re writing a sequel   that counts even more in favor of sticking with the same language  instead of rewriting it in a new language  more so since you ll likely reintroduce a ton of bugs which you ll need to spend time ironing out   Finally  it s rare for games to be written in 100  C   anyway - a lot is done using scripting languages  whether they re custom or just integrating an existing languages  Lua being one of the more popular ones these days    As far as garbage collection is concerned  that can be a bit of a problem  The problem is not so much that it exists  it s more how it works - the garbage collector MUST be non-blocking  or at least be guaranteed to only block very briefly   since it s simply unacceptable to have the game freeze for 10 seconds while it scans all the allocated memory to see what can be freed  I know Java tends to choke quite a bit in GC ing when it s close to running out of memory  and for some games out there  it will    You re also a bit more restricted in what you can do  you can t fully exploit the hardware due to the overhead of the runtime  Imagine Crysis being written in Java    even if that s the only visible difference  it just wouldn t be the same  I m also pretty sure you d need a Core i7 to run it      This doesn t mean these languages don t have their place in game development - and no  I m not just referring to tool programming  For most games  you don t need that extra bit of performance you get from C    including 3D games  and if you re writing it all from scratch  it can make perfect sense to use something like XNA - in fact  there s a good chance it will   As far as commercial games are concerned - does RuneScape count  That may well be the most succesful Java game out there

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A large reason is that video games require direct knowledge of the hardware underneath  often times  and there really is no great implementation for many architectures  It s the knowledge of the underlying hardware architecture that allows developers to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a gaming system  Why would you take the time to port Java to a gaming platform  and then write a game on top of that port when you could just write the game   edit  this is to say that it s more than a  speed  or  don t have the right libraries  issue  Those two things go hand-in-hand with this  but it s more a matter of  how do I make a system like the cell b e  run my java code  there aren t really any good java compilers that can manage the pipelines and vectors like i need

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For one thing  Java s lack of operator overloading makes all of the math you have to deal with to get a working graphics pipeline very  very annoying and hard to read   All of the matrix multiplication and affine vectors you need to deal with are a lot easier to follow if they re in well-formed mathematical expressions rather than object-oriented expressions like  product   vector multiply projectionMatrix  dotProduct otherVector     That s just terrible  Math shouldn t look like that

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I m playing the Sims 3  and I did some poking around  The graphics engine is C    while the scripting and behavior engine is C  Mono  So while C   is there for time critical bits   other stuff like  interaction  game logic  AI is in an object oriented managed language

[java] Why are only a few video games written in Java?

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