Java has matured considerably over the last couple of years and has entered the mainstream as a competitive technology. Nevertheless Java is not typically thought of as a game development language. We feel the the benefits of Java far outweighed the slight performance penalty, and that it would only improve more with time. Since we are planning Magicosm to have a very long lifespan, we feel that Java will serve us well many years down the road. Java (and to a lesser degree Java3d) is relatively platform independent. It is our hope that Magicosm will be able to run on many different platforms as Java3d is ported to work on Macintosh and other hardware manufacturers. Java3d already works on MS Windows, Linux on IBM-compatible computers, and Solaris.
