Now the base code is much more modular, and we can be more selective in the packages that we want to use instead of using a giant monolithic jar file. LWJGL 3.1 introduced some changes in the way that the project is built. The source code folder defines a parent project which defines the plugins to be used and collects the versions of the libraries employed. This book does not intend to be a maven tutorial, so please find the information about it in the web in case you need it. Maven follows the principle of convention over configuration, that is, if you stick to the standard project structure and naming conventions the configuration file does not need to explicitly say where source files are or where compiled classes should be located.

Maven builds projects based on an XML file named pom.xml (Project Object Model) which manages project dependencies (the libraries you need to use) and the steps to be performed during the build process. Just open the folder that contains the chapter sample and IntelliJ will detect that it is a maven project. Maven is already integrated in most IDEs and you can directly open the different samples inside them. įor building our samples we will be using Maven. IntelliJ provides a free open source version, the Community version, which you can download from here. Since Java 10 is only available, by now, for 64 bits platforms, remeber to download the 64 bits version of IntelliJ. You can download IntelliJ IDEA which has good support for Java 10. You may use the Java IDE you want in order to run the samples. This book assumes that you have a moderate understanding of the Java language. Just choose the installer that suits your Operating System and install it. We will be using Java 10, so you need to download the Java SDK from Oracle’s pages. The benefit of doing it this way is that you will get a much better understanding of 3D graphics and also you can get better control.Īs said in the previous paragraphs we will be using Java for this book. By using this low level API you will have to go through many concepts and write lots of lines of code before you see the results. If your idea is to start creating 3D games in a short period of time maybe you should consider other alternatives like. LWJGL is a low level API that acts like a wrapper around OpenGL. The LWJGL library enables the access to low-level APIs (Application Programming Interface) such as OpenGL. We will develop our samples in Java and we will use the Lightweight Java Game Library ( LWJGL).

In this book we will learn the principal techniques involved in developing 3D games.

Lwjgl