Thursday, October 13, 2011

Pac-Man in JavaFX 2

JavaFX 2 Beta was FINALLY released for Mac OS X. I thought I would learn it by porting one of my favorite JavaFX 1 games: Pac-Man! The original code was written by Henry Zhang. He wrote a five-part series of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) explaining the design of the game. He also wrote a neat widget for the game.

I ported the original JavaFX 1 code to JavaFX 2 using the Java SE bundle of Netbeans 7.1 Beta on my MacBook. If you want to play the game on a Mac you can install the SDK and samples, download my JAR file, and place it in your samples folder. Double-click the pacman.jar file from within the javafx-samples-2.0 folder to launch the game. Make sure you install the samples according to the instructions here.

If you are on Windows, you will need to have Java SE 6 Update 26 or later and the JavaFX 2 runtime installed. If everything is installed correctly, you can click here to launch Pac-Man in Java Web Start. Or you can play in the applet below. If JavaFX 2 is not installed correctly, you will see an image asking you to install JavaFX rather than a working applet.


I can post the source code here or put it on GitHub if anyone is interested. Right now, the code is a bit messy. It still has all of Henry Zhang's original JavaFX 1 code commented-out inline with the new JavaFX 2 code. Enjoy the game!


11 comments:

  1. Nice job!! I would like to see the sources. Thank you.

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  2. Nice work.

    Any particular reason why you link to jnlp file directly and not using dtjava? E.g. like it is
    described here:
    http://download.oracle.com/javafx/2.0/deployment/deployment_toolkit.htm#sthref46

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  3. @Anonymous:
    All deployment code was automatically generated by NetBeans into the dist/ directory of the project. I simply copied the HTML from the automatically generated files.

    Thanks for the link. I'll play around with having the JavaScript handle the click to see if it works better.

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  4. I doing code this game in javafx 2.0, and i have some problem in convert code from javafx 1 to javafx 2. So can you email for me to exchange about this work ? my email: congngale@gmail.com

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  5. I have some trouble in javafx 2.0, so can you send me your source code, thanks congale@gmail.com

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  6. I'm having trouble installing JavaFX for OSX... actually I wouldn't know where to begin. The downloadable file contains a bunch of dylib/jnilib, where do I put them? The Oracle webstate just states "unzip to your filesystem" as instructions, but obviously that's not much of a help.

    Can someone please help me?

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  7. I would like to have a copy of the source code for review. You can send it in my email, gjbalan12@yahoo.com. Thanks.

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  8. Hey, very nice work. i am actually expertimenting with javafx2, and it would be a great help to see your source code. can you communicate it?

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  9. Can you send me the sourcecode?

    rossmann.dominik@yahoo.com

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