A monkey's wishlist

Troubleshooting General Help
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Now that I’ve been using JME for a while, I have to say it’s a darn fine engine. I’ve been trying for a while to make a really AAA looking natural landscape environment as a showcase/demo of the engine’s capabilities but there’s a few things I feel are hindering me from achieving that at the moment.

I’m sure most people are aware of these issues but I thought it might be an idea write them down here in case people are able to say “omg you’re a noob that works already” or to perhaps try to bump them up the todo list a bit :slight_smile:


  • Terrain editing issues. I haven’t had much luck making a large terrain in the JMP. Making a terrain tile over 512 in size seems to cause crashes in the IDE, scaling one up seems to cause problems with camera clipping and things to fall through.

    The paging terrain does work now, but the popping is still too obvious to make it really usable for my purposes and the lack of in-editor support yet means editing the grid of heightmaps and having everything match up is beyond my monkey brain :stuck_out_tongue:



    -The forester component still has transparency issues for me, which makes it tricky to do the trees and grass and its not integrated into the editor yet (think androlo is working on his running water mainly at the moment which will also be awesome for a nature scene though) :slight_smile:


  • Editor crashes. I seem to get slowdowns and run out of memory quite often and get crashes when working with scenes of a size that would seem reasonable compared to other engines I’ve used. I’ve tried adjusting the heap size and also normen’s latest test build with the new netbeans version but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Does anyone have tips on the best settings to use or what can be tweaked? Perhaps there’s more culling tricks that could be used in the editor?



    Other than that I think there is nothing much missing from the engine that would prevent me from making a nice demo scene like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsq1oWThCLY, all the shaders, lighting, cameras, skybox, culling and everything else about the engine needed to make it work seem just fine so I am just holding out for those things :slight_smile:
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To make a seamless heightmap create one large heightmap containing everything - and then only at export stage from whatever image editor you are using split it up into the smaller tiles. You should even be able to find features/scripts for your editor of choice to do the split automatically.

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Thanks for the constructive input!

a) This will be remedied by streaming terrain in the editor using TerrainGrid (it will even be able to stream in other models attached to the terrain)

b) Its not in core yet, the core devs will scrutinize it when it is :wink:

c) You have to tweak the direct buffer size, not the heap size and yes, it could be a bit faster but I think the RC1 was, wasn’t it? (apart from the memory issues you now know how to solve)

d) We intend to add some templates for basic game scenarios like FPS, RTS etc. Maybe thats a chance to get some “create and click” fancyness beyond a simple blue box :wink:

Cheers!