[Android] golden times to come (ART)

General Discussion
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Some of you may have noticed, that Google is hardly working on an replacement of their Android runtime called dalvik. Since the version 4.4 Android contains the “ART” (android runtime). Unlike dalvik it doesn’t use any kind of just intime compiler. It compiles the .dex files directly to machine code and also should feature the ability to use about the whole available heap memory. This way jMonkey should run simply as fast, as naive code should do.
That feels like THE time for this great engine to place itself within the top mobile engines around (namely unreal, unity and project anarchy).

Greetz

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For reference from last week:
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/lets-forget-about-dalvik/ (the subject is ‘tongue-in-cheek’)

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My fault… could be closed in this case :oops:

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@Android.Enthusiast said: My fault... could be closed in this case :oops:

Nah, it’s ok… I just wanted to make sure any conversations got linked.

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@Android.Enthusiast said: That feels like THE time for this great engine to place itself within the top mobile engines around (namely unreal, unity and project anarchy).

Competing with commercial engines would be really hard on the tools front.

For an example, look at this shader node editor for the Source engine: [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82AMwQGjc8Y[/video]
Now that’s not Valve who’s coding there but an independent dev, but I think Valve created something similar for Unity 4, possibly after seeing this video :slight_smile:

We do have the first beginnings of a shader node editor, so we’re not drawing a blank.
But we’re way, way behind, and I’m not seeing JME catching up quickly in this particular area.

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Well we at least in comarison to source we can have large maps^^. They are in front on various tools, but behind on low level features actually.

But stuff like the unreal material editor are around since centruries, and are very cleaned up and streamlined.

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I understand it this way, that jMonkey is incredibly simple and grants high potential and low level access to the dev after a couple of days to dive in. Actually the tools might not be that matured but the potential to do about everything is there either. And about the topic itself. I just playd around with a couple of engines like project anarchy (havok vision) and jMonkey. And I would prefer doing stuff with jmonkey than vision. If it would be even almost as fast. So I hope, ART catches on and will be part of the soonest release. If not already final on later 4.4 updates.

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@toolforger said: For an example, look at this shader node editor for the Source engine:.
Yeah you say that because they have spline lines to connect nodes ;)
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@nehon said: Yeah you say that because they have spline lines to connect nodes ;)

Heh. True they have these, and having them in the shadernode editor would be nice, but that’s actually not what I meant; I meant these two:

  • A mini-preview on each node.
  • A preview of the end result on any model, or even in a running game. (I thought the latter would require some über communication infrastructure between editor and game, but on second thinking, I realized that it’s enough if the JME engine scans the shadernode files for updates.)