Introduction

The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is a solution aimed directly at professional and amateur Java programmers alike to enable commercial quality games to be written in Java. LWJGL provides developers access to high performance crossplatform libraries such as OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) and OpenAL (Open Audio Library) allowing for state of the art 3D games and 3D sound. Additionally LWJGL provides access to controllers such as Gamepads, Steering wheel and Joysticks. All in a simple and straight forward API.

LWJGL is not meant to make writing games particularly easy; it is primarily an enabling technology which allows developers to get at resources that are simply otherwise unavailable or poorly implemented on the existing Java platform. We anticipate that the LWJGL will, through evolution and extension, become the foundation for more complete game libraries and "game engines" as they have popularly become known, and hide some of the new evils we have had to expose in the APIs.

LWJGL is available under a BSD license, which means it's open source and freely available at no charge.

Please visit us on the Freenode IRC Network: #LWJGL. Do idle if there is no one to answer any of your questions, we are on different timezones.

News

Almost there! - LWJGL 2.0 Release Candidate 1 is ready for consumption! Saturday, June 7th, 2008
First RC delivered. Might still be some minor issues left - but basically done... Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

First release of LWJGL 2.0 Sunday, April 20th, 2008
We finally released the first beta of LWJGL 2.0. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 1.1.4 released! Monday, January 21st, 2008
First release in 2008!. This is mostly a bugfix and performance release. It is expected that this is the last release in the 1.1 series. We are now working towards a 2.0 release. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 1.1.3 released! Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
Better applet support, spec updates and some crash fixes. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 1.1.2 released! Friday, August 17th, 2007
Basically a Windows bugfix release. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 1.1.1 released! Sunday, August 5th, 2007
Mostly a bug fix release. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 1.1 released! Monday, April 30th, 2007
We bumped the number a nod. Now at 1.1, featuring some linux fixes, optimizations and OpenAL 1.1 support. Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.