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P laying PC games with a keyboard and mouse can sometimes feel like playing tennis in a tuxedo-entirely possible but not quite right. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler to pull out that gamepad, joystick, or steering wheel, plug it in, and play games the way that nature intended? It’s not that difficult, as the next two chapters will show. I start by giving some background on JInput (https://jinput.dev.java.net/), an open source API for game controller discovery and polled input.

B ack in Chapter 4, I developed an example involving two multijointed arms with fingers ( grabbers ). One drawback of the coding was the bewildering mix of key combinations needed to translate and rotate the arms. This chapter connects a gamepad to the grabbers, making them much easier to control, mainly because of the intuitive mapping of the grabbers’ operations to the pad’s analog sticks, hat, and buttons. For example, the left stick controls the x- and y-axis rotations of the left arm, and the right stick handles the right arm.

T his chapter interrupts the discussion of nonstandard input devices programming so we can look at JOAL (https://joal.dev.java.net/), a Java wrapper around OpenAL. OpenAL, the Open Audio Library, is a cross-platform API for programming 2D and 3D audio (http://www.openal.org/).

I f you’ve been keeping count, the nonstandard devices that I’ve looked at so far are the webcam (for watching your arm waving) and the gamepad, both of which are common add-on devices for the PC. This chapter travels a less popular path, tentatively entering the exciting world of virtual reality (VR) gaming. Tentative because VR gear (e.g., data gloves, stereoscopic goggles, and even full-body suits) can be rather expensive and complex. Fortunately, I’m using the low-priced, simple-to-use P5 virtual reality glove, so it’s full steam ahead into a bargain-basement version of Minority Report .

T his chapter introduces JOGL (https://jogl.dev.java.net/), a Java wrapper for the 3D (and 2D) graphics library OpenGL (http://www.opengl.org/). I’ll implement a simple example, a rotating multicolored cube, using two programming frameworks, one employing callbacks , the other utilizing active rendering . One way that I compare them is by seeing how well they handle different frame rates for the cube’s animation.

T he previous chapter was about two programming frameworks for JOGL (callbacks and active rendering), with a simple rotating cube as the example. This chapter utilizes the active rendering framework to build a more substantial application: a small 3D world containing a checkerboard floor, a skybox, lighting, a rotating sphere, and billboards. The user moves around the scene using keyboard controls with the aim of finding shapes lying on the ground. The game begins with a start screen and finishes with a “Game Over” message.

T his chapter continues using the 3D world of Chapter 16, but as a setting to demonstrate four new coding techniques: * The loading and positioning of 3D models created using the Wavefront OBJ file format. • The selection ( picking ) of objects in the scene by clicking them with the mouse. OpenGL’s selection mode is utilized to implement this feature. • 3D sound , in this case the chirping of a penguin, which varies as the user moves around the scene (nearer and farther from a penguin model). It’s implemented using JOAL and the JOALSoundMan class introduced in Chapters 13. • Fog shrouding the scene, making it harder to find the models.