Searching for Other Options

A few quick emails yesterday afternoon all but nixed using JavaFX. Apparently it doesn't work at all with Mac, and our project is attempting to be cross-platform friendly from the beginning .

For our Digital Archaeology Project, we had a few ideas as to what software to use to design it:

• Swing
• GWT
• JavaFX
• Unity3D
• Slick

Swing was quickly eliminated, as there are more powerful options in the list. Slick is what was used for the Morgan's Raid project, so we all are very familiar with it. However, it doesn't have a good solution for creating buttons and a custom interface. Those things would need to be done by hand,which is possible but difficult. So that left us with GWT, JavaFX, and Unity3D. The latter option is a 3D game engine that has some really approachable tools. The downfall is that these tools cost money and aren't very recreate-able without going in and typing things in by hand. In other words, it can't be used in other instances programmaticly, other archaeology sites would need to be redone by hand.

So with Swing and JavaFX out, the team is focusing on GWT and Unity3D this weekend. We know what Slick can do, but the other two options are relative unknowns. I have GWT all set up on my machine here at home and a free afternoon ahead of me!