Notice that only one answer states you should avoid a game engine altogether. Another answer suggests a game framework, which is closer to an engine than what you’re doing. Everybody else say use a game engine unless you just enjoy building game engines. A game engine will simplify a lot of your current tasks like having built-in GUI systems for things like buttons, layers for hiding/showing or activating/deactivating different objects without moving to a whole new screen, a method for quickly positioning objects on the screen, a better graphic rendering system to reduce processing power requirements, etc. Designing a tool for handling bayesian probability is just a small part of the steps to building your game. AGS isn’t necessarily the engine you should be using, but you should be using a different toolset than just Java. The time spent learning an engine is lower than the time required to do this from scratch.
A combination of Java’s existing GUI libraries and JUNG seems to take care of those things pretty well so far. It does need some amount of hacking to do the things that I’d like it to do, but that’d be the case with any pre-existing solution.
The question does ask “or should I make my own engine”, which is different situation from making a 2D game on top of basic graphics libraries that’s not much at all like existing games. Game engines are generally expected to involve an extensive visual game world with many assets and behaviors to manage, and this project doesn’t seem to have one.
For 2D GUIs, there are programming techniques like imgui for making a GUI while keeping the program architecture lightweight. Out of the free existing GUI frameworks, Qt is pretty impressive.
http://www.quora.com/Should-I-use-a-game-engine-that-is-already-made-or-should-I-take-the-time-to-make-my-own
Notice that only one answer states you should avoid a game engine altogether. Another answer suggests a game framework, which is closer to an engine than what you’re doing. Everybody else say use a game engine unless you just enjoy building game engines. A game engine will simplify a lot of your current tasks like having built-in GUI systems for things like buttons, layers for hiding/showing or activating/deactivating different objects without moving to a whole new screen, a method for quickly positioning objects on the screen, a better graphic rendering system to reduce processing power requirements, etc. Designing a tool for handling bayesian probability is just a small part of the steps to building your game. AGS isn’t necessarily the engine you should be using, but you should be using a different toolset than just Java. The time spent learning an engine is lower than the time required to do this from scratch.
A combination of Java’s existing GUI libraries and JUNG seems to take care of those things pretty well so far. It does need some amount of hacking to do the things that I’d like it to do, but that’d be the case with any pre-existing solution.
The question does ask “or should I make my own engine”, which is different situation from making a 2D game on top of basic graphics libraries that’s not much at all like existing games. Game engines are generally expected to involve an extensive visual game world with many assets and behaviors to manage, and this project doesn’t seem to have one.
For 2D GUIs, there are programming techniques like imgui for making a GUI while keeping the program architecture lightweight. Out of the free existing GUI frameworks, Qt is pretty impressive.