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 in different timezones.

News

LWJGL 2.5 Friday, July 16th, 2010
To hot outside? - get inside, switch on the AC unit - and start hacking away with the latest LWJGL release.
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.4 Sunday, April 11th, 2010
New release with a ton of fixes and support for OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.3 Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Important release that fixes issues with ATI 10.x drivers. Consider upgrading ASAP.
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.2.2 Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
First release in the new year. Mostly bugfixes.
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.2.1 Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.1.0 Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.

LWJGL 2.0.1 Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
Please check this thread for more info regarding the release.