title: Java real time strategy game development
body: <p>I'm coming to the end of my first year of CS and I thought a great way to consolidate all the things I've learnt this year would be a personal game project.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to implement a 2D based rts, I'm thinking along the lines of starcraft I, warcraft II or even command and conquer. I will have about 3 months without interruptions to implement the game.</p>
  
  <p>So to anyone experienced with java game programming, I have a few questions:</p>
  
  <p>Is it realistic to design a 2D rts engine from scratch in 3 months?
  If so what are some good books/resources to get started?</p>
  
  <p>Would it be better to modify some existing project? I would think the experience of having to work with a lot of someone else's code would be good since our exposure to such topics in an undergrad cs degree seems very rare, if non-existent.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any decent open source 2d rts projects that anyone could recommend? I've looked through a few but most seem to be written in c/c++</p>
  
  <p>My humble thanks</p>
  
  <p>Edit: Thanks for the quick responses, I think that perhaps it was a bad idea to post this in a rush since I think I misrepresented what I want to do. </p>
  
  <p>When I say "along the lines of warcraft II etc" I mean more like that style of rts using sprites. I don't intend to implement a game nearly that complex, more like just a basic prototype. </p>
  
  <p>My goal would be some thing more like a flat textured map with some basic obstacles like trees, a single unit producing structure like a barracks. I'd like to have the units to have health bars, be able to move and attack and die (and possible morph into another unit). </p>
  
  <p>Far off goals would be to implement some basic pathing using a modified version of the dijkstra shortest path algorithm, ranged units with missle attack, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I don't plan to implement any opponents or ai or networking or anything like that.</p>