Newbie help

[browney14]

Hi,
I am currently learning java in the hopes of making a 3d game in the future, I know you have probably read this hundreds of times ;P but I am not taking the difficulties involved lightly. I am giving myself atleast 5 years to make a somewhat decent game, including learning Java to a proficient level. I know Visual basic to a low level as I spent a year at college doing a VB course, so I understand the basics of programming. I have bought several books and have found some good references and tutorials online. for the past few days I have been learning Java and transferring my vb skills over.
But i have a few questions concerning 3D development, I an currently using Eclipse as my IDE for practice but I have no idea what else is needed for games, 2d or 3d. I understand that some developers use LWJGL for something, but what exactly would i need besides Eclipse to start writing in 3D when the time comes, can you also please reccomend 2D development tools aswell incase I begin with that. I have heard of Jmonkey but I am not too sure what it is other than it allows you to create 3D environments.
Next question. How are 3d games written in Java, i dont quite understand, say I wanted to make an island with a mountain on it and some trees dotted about with just a basic green and grey texture for the mountain and grass respectively. how could i create that from code?

One more question, I promise :P I dont fully understand the "main" method in Java, I undertand that the program first finds this main method as it does in vb and runs from there. does the main method extend throughout the entirety of the classes or is there a main method in every class. e.g. does a large java game with 60-70 classes and lots of code only have one main class? and does that class generally just become a directory to other classes?

This did end up being more questions than I expected and I still have lots more, but these are the most important ones to me at the minute.
Thanks for any replies :D

[JosAH]

One more question, I promise :P I dont fully understand the "main" method in Java, I undertand that the program first finds this main method as it does in vb and runs from there. does the main method extend throughout the entirety of the classes or is there a main method in every class. e.g. does a large java game with 60-70 classes and lots of code only have one main class? and does that class generally just become a directory to other classes?

I'll just answer your last question: there's is nothing special about the main( ... ) method, it is just static method but the JVM searches for it when you want to start your program by mentioning a class name, i.e. first the JVM tries to find the class; if found it searches for that particular main( ... ) method in the class; if found it calls it and your program is up and running. Any class can contain a main( ... ) method but it doesn't need to if that class is not meant to be a starting point of a program. The main( ... ) method needs to be static and needs to accept an array of Strings as its parameter. (it also needs to be public and return void).

kind regards,

Jos

[browney14]

Thx, thats one question answered ;P