2 fps  , no sound, not reactive to button pushes.

Config: Matrox G400 (newest driver), 700 Mhz Athlon, 384 Mhz, W2K. LWJGL installed and works great.

Yes, Magicosm looks cool. Unfortunately, there isn't a demo to download so its hard to say how it performs.

Of course an inefficient app performs poorly. My worry was that a (seemingly) slow 3D engine (Java3D) is a showstopper for any application, regardless of its efficiency. Who wants to base their application on a slow framework?

However, it seems that people here agree that Java3D is fast enough for games purposes *provided* you use it efficiently. (Hopefully, using Java3D *efficiently* won't make your code too hard to write and maintain, thereby forcing you to sacrifice the reason that made you start using it in the first place.)

Thanx for your input. I guess I'll give Java3D a try and see for myself how it performs.

Hmm, that might be it. A few days ago I tried to install GL4Java and, even though the installation went ok, GL4Java didn't work.

So the conclusion seems to be: GL4Java doesn't work on Matrox G400 (at least with the driver I am (and was) using).

Well, now I have  

Still got the same problem, though.

Everything else works properly: LWJGL, Java3D, games, etc. so I can hardly believe its the driver...

I am having trouble running the game...

Environment: Matrox G400, JRE 1.4.1_01, 700 Mhz Athlon, 384 MB RAM.

Problem: After clicking the "Escape" icon the screen turns black. The mouse cursor is there, but that's it.

Too bad. I would really like to see the game.

Matrox G400, 700 Mhz Athlon, 384 MB RAM.

Works like a charm. Just hit that "run_win_gl.bat" and off you go!

In OGL mode, it runs at about 48 fps (if I sit real still  ).

In software rendering mode, it runs at nearly 8 fps. Impressive.

I have a need for speed - both in terms of rendering and software development. For me that means a high-level API (like Java3D) with the speed of LWJGL.

I really like the Java 3D API, but two things worry me.

First, Java 3D performs really poorly - and I still haven't seen a demo to convince me otherwise. I have tried the RoboForge game, which is written in Java using Java 3D and - while its an original game - the graphics performance is certainly not good (compared to e.g. Quake). Can anyone point me towards a Java 3D demo that rocks? I really don't believe that anyone will use Java 3D for games development until such a demo is made. Why hasn't Sun created such a demo? What is it that makes Java 3D so slow? A bad design? A poor implementation? Something else?

Second, is a scene-graph-based API (like Java 3D) a poor choice in games development? If so, what is the alternative? (I am a newbie so please bear with me.) What kind of design does state-of-the-art 3D engines use (e.g. Quake) that make them so mind-blowingly fast?

Thanks.