Hi,
I am looking into game programming in Java to see if it is feasible. When googling for it I find several old references to Java2D, Project Darkstar (Sun's MMO-server) and some books on Java game programming. But alot of the information seems to be several years old.
So the question I am asking, is anyone creating any games in Java SE 1.5 or above?
If so, what frameworks are used and are there any best practices or libraries available?
there is the excellent open source 3d engine called jMonkey (http://www.jmonkeyengine.com) which is being used for a few commercial projects as well as hobby developers... there is also at a lower level the lwjgl library which jmonkeyengine is built on which is a set of apis to wrap opengl as well as provide other game specific libs...
I haven't directly done any game programming but some scene-demo coding and have found that JOGL is really a quite nice framework to work with. It's Java OpenGL so it has a rich 3D functionality and i do believe there are some open source graphic engines done for it aswell.
GTGE (www.goldenstudios.or.id) is an excellent 2D Java Game Library, with tutorials and an extensive API. It has gone open-source in its latest version, and the source can be downloaded, browsed, etc. at gtge.googlecode.com.
Despite the odd name ( pretty sure he's talking about the soft drink...), this site has loads of resources and examples games both 2D and 3D. Coke and Code
http://www.javagaming.org/ is a good source for up-to-date information.
Another framework not mentioned yet is Xith3D
Also check Pulp core - deals with the most common problems facing Java gaming.
As an update, a couple of the JMonkeyEngine guys have forked that project to create Ardor3d, a new version of which was recently released, so its still under active development. Project Darkstar is also still actively developed. Indeed DarkMMO an opensource example Darkstar game is being currently refactored to use the latest version of both Darkstar and Ardor3d.