PulpCore

Applets are back.

PulpCore is a free, open source (BSD license) 2D rendering and animation framework for the Java plug-in. It allows Java developers to create modern-looking 2D web games with a strong focus on animation and positive user experiences. Also, PulpCore is designed for ease of development with an intuitive API and a smooth, uninterrupted workflow.

Is PulpCore the right framework for your project?

PulpCore is designed to fix the problems associated with Java applets by providing attractive loading screens, consistent rendering speeds, and a truly portable engine that works across all major operating systems and Java runtime versions.

While PulpCore provides a great boilerplate for a game project, it doesn’t include everything you might be looking for. For example, it doesn’t include vector graphics, collision detection, AWT/Swing integration, or multiplayer networking. Also, if you want to create hardware-accelerated desktop games, you might want to try a different framework, like Slick, a 2D game engine built on OpenGL, or jME, a 3D scene graph engine also built on OpenGL.

Compared to other browser-based frameworks, PulpCore has a easy-to-use API, great performance, and it’s built on Java, so it can integrate with a wide variety of existing Java libraries. See a comparison of several other browser-based frameworks at www.bubblemark.com.

Other simliar Java projects include Processing, JGame, GTGE, and Project Scene Graph.

Get started

PulpCore apps require Java 1.4 or newer to run. To build PulpCore apps, you’ll need:

• PulpCore 0.11.3
• JDK 6 (JDK 1.5 on Mac OS X works, too)
• An editor or IDE with Apache Ant built in, like NetBeans, Eclipse, jEdit, or TextMate. Visit the Wiki for details on quickly setting up PulpCore on your system.
• ProGuard 3.11 is recommended (but not required!)