An era ends ... *sigh*

@bubuche, I sometimes also think, why arn’t there xyz or why the fuck is zz missing. But then I realize, this is free software I haven’t payed one single buck. All is done in spare time where you better go outsid playing football with your kids or sit and read a good book, spend time with friends. But there are people which like programming or don’t yet have family but time for this.
So when ever I think why the heck is this missing I start to think and do it my self as all the jme developers do this for free. So if you think you can do this better or relay an something better why not go there. It is not a shame using an other game engine where you may get more stock stuff. You will most probably have to pay for it.

So… it needs people with time and maybe also a list of why does this not work out of the box and provide a solution to the community.

There was here one post which also started with a I wanted to load tile based asset (dont know exact the name of that) but there is no solution yet… I’ll start one and will provide it to the community! That would be a way to do it, a very honorable way. And he keeped us posted.

I believe I understand their core motivation. This sort of thing happens when you reach the level when knowledge becomes wisdom. And you realize that sharing it brings more satisfaction than making one million bucks just for yourself on it. A feeling I hope to reach one day too.

I was wondering where these kinds of threads are. It is always so civil here. I mean you don’t have a banhammer for nothing. So i want to play :smiley:

jME isn’t quite Unity. that is right, a 100% better than free (BSD is better than free), 100% spare time engine, is almost as good as something that has dozens to hundreds of people working on it and charge plenty, once your making money. That is dam impressive.

Now sure there are some things missing. But not much and mostly for indie devs not stuff we really should be worrying about mostly. The code is written well and is easy to read.

Is it perfect. No. But then last year after a unity update my friends entire asset pipeline came crashing down. Basically it doesn’t matter what engine you use. There are things that need to be worked around.

And if not. Make a game with Unreal or unity already. TBH i will give Unreal another crack after this game. But C++ literally keeps me awake at night with mem leaks and segfaults.

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jME stands out to me for these reasons:
-Java
-IMO, it’s more like an SDK in many ways than an engine–and I like that.
-No real entangling rules or agreements to worry about

Whenever I’ve considered going back to C++ (which I was pretty good at, but I haven’t used for about 12 years :flushed:) for that bit of extra control and performance, I start thinking…

-Memory management… why am I spending time on this?
-That dang networking, if I ever need to use it…
-Need to find a good UI solution…
-Oh yeah, no Java stacktraces…
-Why is the code so damn ugly, odd conventions and weird complex syntax everywhere…
-Stupid header files, why can’t this just be at the top of the cpp file… (Well it can, but unconventional.)
-Need to relearn the STL…

…and so on. After recalling some of that and realizing how much I’ve completely forgotten, Java seems like the only sane option if I want to ever get anything done.

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I have to add my 2 cents. Some of you in this thread are complaining that xx is missing, yy is missing etc. While it might be sometimes true, there are a lot of user contributions, libraries or other forms of code, which get posted to the forum and then they drown in the new topics and anyone who wasn’t here when the topic was created can complain “why jme has no xx”, the xx being the problem that the contrib solves.

So I suggest that we make an official list of user created libraries and contributions. I know it would be a hassle to actively maintain it, but only adding a link to it in the forum header and letting users edit it would probably be enough.

And yes I know that there is a jme-contributions github. But stuff there is mostly outdated and only a small portion of the libraries community creates.

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Isn’t that something which @atomixnmc want to achive with his asset store? Sort of right? So I personally look forward that contribution :slight_smile:

I don’t agree. It is more that you found time to tackle a topic where you found no fitting solution and thought that others may also miss it. So I think it has not much to do with wisdom. But that is just my opinion.

Agreed, and keeping Maven/Cradle accessible builds on Bintray would be great too.

Why @bubuche has picked nickname bubuche not user or human?

It could be that we mention slightly different things. Yeah, when you miss something in JME, and you dig into details, and then share your solution - this can be well explained: first, you needed solution anyway, second, your solution will be at least reviewed by some other interested/capable people and occasionally even improved. So you found time to do it. But I refer to a situation that there’s no JME, no site and this forum, no “Scenegraph for Dummies”, nothing. And you have to have not only capabilities (would you start your own engine now? I definitely wouldn’t), but an incredible motivation level to do all that work, considering its amount, and knowing - from the very start, designing it that way - that you aren’t going to get paid for it (well, not with money). Doing it not just once or twice occasionally, but for years, responding to all these regularly repeating questions (knowing full well that you won’t get anything new from these), all that. That sort of motivation is what I mentioned. I can be wrong, of course, but so far I can’t imagine any other source of it.

As a master programmer you should be aware of the tricks games have to go through to impersonate certain things; and if you don’t - just ask how it’s done. But there’s no need to be so rude and put the engine down. Maybe it isn’t as successful as the other engines, but then again - nobody gets paid.

I don’t know of any other engine where a core developer will sit and walk you through your problem. These guys are seriously knowledgeable - and they will share it all if you care to listen - for free. Reading through some of their code fascinates me, and I’ve been in this game for more years than I care to remember.

My only feeling that isn’t positive about the engine is my lack of contribution. The devs are swamped. But here they are anyway, giving everything they have for free. Just be nice man. Or, you know, try something else.

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The argument that keeps coming is “it’s free”. So, let’s tackle this one, once and for all.
Would you take a virus, or an arrow to the knee, because “it’s free”. No.
The core reason : because it causes you more trouble than it gives you solutions.

The problem of the “almost” thing is that you’ll start to code around that to later found that it doesn’t work and you have no solution but to either re-do all your code from scratch or add a fat level of entropy in your code to move to your homemade solution that solves this problem.
And this kind of thing pretty much kill your momentum in the game development. You stop developing your game to develop a patch that will suit your need and, when you develop it you find an other problem in the engine that need a solution … and month later, it’s just too late, you are not in the correct mood anymore.

You make a multiplayer game, so you need connection, so you need security … but the library doesn’t have this functionality, nor the possibility to add it. So you develop your own solution, modify your code to suit that new library, and it works “meh” then you want to have in-game ui (like an in-game screen) and you find that the gui library allow only one instance at the same time (cause it uses global variables).
So you try to pick an other one, modify your code to suit this new library and already start to have difficulties to understand why this or this piece of code is like that.
Then you find that the charactercontrol has bugs (i already talked enough about it), then you start to do your own, then you modify your code.
Then you find that there is no character in the stock asset, no monster to be a placeholder for basic creep. Then you start to make some.

Then … you download once again this very first piece of code you saw about this library, the physic demo with a fps running in an empty small “town”. And you understand.

It’s what I try to do. There is a technical demo of Avarra Gui around, an attempt to make an other gui library with a “swing” approach (ie : an implementation of the Graphics interface).
I even ported a “worms” game initially made in swing to it, and most of the port was replacing “import java.awt.Graphics” by import of my Graphics. There was some other things too (so it was not that straight). But i realized design flaws and i am now working on fixing them. I also worked on a doom port, in two part, one not related to jme at all which is a “i need a frontend” project and the other “i am a frontend project using jme”. Then i also created a frontend for a custom engine and translated the “need frontend” into c++, for an engine in c++.
This last project was more or less stopped when I tried to implement a portal culling (sectors in doom are perfect portals, and it’s somehow how the original doom engine worked, drawing iteratively from the camera until no pixel need a redraw) and found a no-no. Jme locks opengl commands, don’t touch it, blahhh.

Where is the “creating” in this ? In the story ?
And i actually write a lot of story. Some big ( 100.000 words ) some smaller. But there is thing that you can tell with a picture and not with a book.

I have scenes in my head with very precise camera movement, angles, transitions, sound, lighting. I would make a movie if i had enough money (but “enough money” for big spatial station movie is a lot of money.

tired

EDIT : if you post just to say “olol Avarra Gui” … just don’t post, you didn’t get it.

Arrow to the knee… Really.

The Cake is a LIE. Deal with it.

And free compiled languages are a lie. You either have free language that are interpreted and are almost usable but will never be usable and will obliged you to restart everything again and again or compiled language for which you need to pay for.

Or not. And this metaphor is not that far from reality : scenes need compilation, as languages do. You can argue that XXX language “is free and thus there is no reason to complain”, if the language said “you can produce professional programs with it” and is an interpreted language with a note saying “… provided you write a good enough compiler”, it will somehow be a problem, don’t you think ?

It’s even worse than that. When, in dead island, you have pieces on paper on the ground, they are actually decals, so it’s even less than billboard. And when you have items in skyrim, they don’t have physic enabled by default, causing floating plates and fruits. They are still interactable, though (and this is actually not the hard part). But do you think that artists then spend a lot of time writing xml files to place object, go back and forth from and to blender to add baked lighted textures and copy past manually textures into a bigger one to make one big tiled image ?
No, cause when you create a game, you need a smooth workflow, you need to be able to do thing without stopping the creation process every day for a week, to fix bugs you didn’t made and features that looked ok at the first glance. Game is all about data (yeah, i forgot to mention : i could add “experience”, “leveling”, “quest” and “perk tree” and still you’ll not know if i am talking about dead island, skyrim, the last ghost recon or a lot of other games that range in this veeery broad category that is fps/tps/rpg).
So I need to be able to put datas in my game easily. So the database view i mentioned.
And then these datas need to be compiled to optimize a lot of stuff, reduce the number of polygons+adding a normal map, calculate a lof of culling (not only portal culling, but it’s a must have for interiors), lod etc.
And i am not talking about new fancy algorithms. I am talking about something that exist in game that are 20 years old (shogo).

It’s not a valid comparison, you should rethink this. There isn’t anything to be gained by taking those two things. If you consider jME equivalent to a virus–providing no benefits whatsoever–I’d have to ask why you’re even here? If jME offers nothing, bypass it and use this: https://www.lwjgl.org/

You seem to be making a Perfect Solution Fallacy (look it up).

Also I’m still not sure what the point of this thread was; you never concisely answered the question I asked about your intent.

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Sorry that is not going to work. You have a choice if you don’t like it take something different. There was another one complain similar. Nobody force you to use JME.
But I guess you love that engine but you are frustrated to the max not being able to use it for your purposes. I can’t see any other reason when people complain about something (no matter if it is free or not). But all your stuff can be fixed with contributions. So why waste your time writing essays instead fix what you miss and contribute. A way much better alternative.
But yeah I already know it doesn’t change your mind no matter what we say so I now off this thread…

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Why JME? I have my own ridiculous reason: It’s Java and I’m javanese.

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I like that… I think I will use it. :slight_smile:

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I switched network code 3 times, without even touching any jme related code, if you could nto do that, you have architectural design issues, as that layers shouldn’t be coupled at all.

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http://static4.fjcdn.com/comments/Shamrockshammy+rolls+5+_49f8436b282ae754324efa7d9a3aae2f.jpg

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