Chapter 16.   Touring the World

In the last chapter, I described two programming frameworks for JOGL (callbacks and active rendering), with a simple rotating cube as the example. In this chapter, I utilize the active rendering framework to build a more substantial application, a small 3D world.

The visual elements are:

• a green and blue checkerboard floor with a red square at its center, and numbers along its x- and z- axes;
• a skybox of stars;
• an orbiting 'earth' (a textured sphere);
• a billboard showing a tree, which rotates around its y-axis to always face the camera;
• five red 'R's placed at random on the ground.

The user can move around the world using the arrow keys to go forward, backwards, left, right, up, down, and turn left and right, but the player can't travel off the checkerboard or beyond the borders of the skybox. The game is terminated by pressing ESC, q, END, or ctrl-c, or by clicking the close box.

TourGL is a very basic game - the user must navigate over the red R's lying on the ground to make them disappear. The game ends when all the R's have been deleted, and a score is calculated based on how long it took to delete the R's.

Since TourGL utilizes the active rendering framework, the game automatically suspends when the window is iconified or deactivated, and can be resized. TourGL also offers two extensions to the framework:

• while the world is being initialized, a message is displayed in the canvas;
• a game-over 2D image with text is displayed when all the R's have disappeared. This stays on-screen until the application is terminated.

Various OpenGL (JOGL) techniques are illustrated in this example, including transparent images as textures, 2D overlays, and bitmap and stroke fonts.

Downloads

• The PDF file for the chapter (286 KB). Last updated: 7th March 2006.
  
• Zipped Source code (196 KB). Last updated: 8th February 2007.
  I updated the code to use new features in JSR 231 RC 2, and added a new GroundShapes class.
  

• Up to the Pro Java 6 3D Game Development Index Page
• Back to Chapter 15. Two JOGL Programming Frameworks
• On to Chapter 17. Picking on the Models