Advantages/Disadvantages of using JMonkeyEngine vs other engines?

Hello, Im new to JME and would like to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of using JMonkeyEngine to make games compared to other engines such as Ardor3d?

Advantages: You use the best and most active open source game engine, you will create actual games faster than in any other game engine. Using shaders is easy as childs play.



Disadvantages: None (maybe the lies and prejudices towards java that are still in some peoples heads)



Compared to Ardor3D directly… Ardor3D is really just jME 2.5, no real deep changes have been made, jME3 is built from the ground up to support shaders etc.

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So according to your post, the performance is better than Ardor3D. Correct?

We have a feature list for this purpose:

https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/legacy/doku.php/jme3:features



Take the feature list of Ardor3D and whatever other engines you have, and compare them.

Choose the engine that has the features you need.

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It should be noted, that JME3 is not the best choice when you want to make a fixed pipeline game …

ehnohpe said:
So according to your post, the performance is better than Ardor3D. Correct?

I don't really think so.... actually I don't know, but the question is not really about performance, but more about feature and how easy the development is with jME3.
jME3 rendering system is entirely based on shaders to fully take advantage of hardware acceleration.

Besides, jME3, is in very active development, with new features every weeks, and has a very active community.

Of course, my words are a bit biased since I'm in the core team, but I had the exact same question about one year ago when I first came here. At the time jME3 was just alpha 1, but even then I chose jME3.

But, the thing is...it's easy to for you to make your own idea about it. Just take a day with Ardor, and a day with jME3 and see what suits your needs better...

For me the advantages of jME3 are:

Stability and speed are good, support for a wide variety of features

Cross platform compatibility thanks to Java

Already does a lot of the things you would otherwise need to write yourself, such as physics, networking and sound. You still need to implement those, but the basics are all there which helps.



Disadvantages:

Still being in alpha, you run the risk of API changes breaking your code. I havent run into anything that I would call a bug in jME itself, though I have run into some problems with nifty GUI.