I was thinking of making an open source 2D game* . This would be my first game, and it’s not supposed to be anything too serious. Would jMonkey be a good engine to use? If not does anyone have a suggestion as to another one? Thanks so much!
~Matt
If you’re looking for a 2D engine you should take a look at Slick2D or GTGE.
Slick is a better engine, but shiet documentation. GTGE has awesome docs for beginners, but its basically dead.
HTH
Feen
jmonkeyEngine is a full blown 3d engine with advanced shader capability. So for the pretty stuff, the user needs a videocard that supports openGL 2.0+. But jmonkeyEngine can be set to use openGL 1.0 that will work on most video cards in the last 10 years.
It is not specifically built to use 2d graphics, but the UI components are all 2d, and NiftyGUI is all 2d; so it is very possibly and quite easy to do.
I suggest trying out a few options. But to “toot our own horn” here, we do have really good support.
So lets say I was to use the jMonkey engine to work on my 2D game, should I follow the generic tutorials on how to start making a 3D one? Or will my experience be completely different? Since you said that only the User Interface components of the engine are 2D will I be making my game entirely within that? And if so do the libraries associated with these UI’s have the functionality that I would want for a game (can collision be detected?)?
Thanks again… like I said I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, and any input helps.
If you haven’t done game programming before and you want to do 2d, it might be better to start with an engine that is strictly dedicated to 2d. You would benefit from specific “how to do this in 2d” tutorials that such an engine would provide. Jme doesn’t really focus on 2d, even though you can do your entire app in 2d.