JMonkeyEngine has been linked on DZone: http://www.dzone.com/links/jmonkeyengine_a_3d_game_engine.html. I voted for it… for better or for worse. Maybe now's a good time to update the front page at least with a little bit about what's been added recently and what's coming up.
Jim
Any volunteers to write news articles for the front page? We need people with better dedication to maintain that page.
Maybe people can take some of the articles in the wiki and expand upon them and post them on the front page.
Right now I'm working on some stuff for jME that I hope to get into some kind of article/tutorial form soon, but progress is slower than you could imagine (work + grad classes + life = no java monkey engine time).
Maybe you could start a topic or board for people wanting to submit articles that could be approved by jME developers for the front page.
My current ideas are:
- Scripting tutorial for jME (lua, python, javascript, all using the Java 6 Script functionality, but there'd need to be a game based around it to really let the scripting languages shine)
- Scorched Earth tank game - A velocity angle turn based game similiar to the classic scorched earth except with hilarious new animations and weapons (think Final Fantasy cutscene attack animations mixed with the game WORMS).
I think it's a good idea to have something like an article pool to where interested authors could submit articles for the main page.
Devs or maybe a frontpage moderator could select the articles that maches the quality requirements and post them.
In general I think it's a good idea to have a more active frontpage, it gives definitely a better impression of the jME-Project.
mojomonk said:
Any volunteers to write news articles for the front page? We need people with better dedication to maintain that page.
What do you mean by news articles?
If you mean writing a paragraph or two about important jME events (such as Mojos big check in yesterday) then I'd be interested in helping.
If mean huge page filled news articles then I wouldn't have the time (paragraph news I can do at work ;))
I think even small newsarticles would increase the attractiveness of the mainpage alot!
But if there is somone willing to write big articles, i think noone would complain…
What do you mean by news articles?
I mean anything. Two line blurb about some jME news, to a full on article about how wonderful my dogs are.
mojomonk said:
What do you mean by news articles?
I mean anything. Two line blurb about some jME news, to a full on article about how wonderful my dogs are.
I'd like to help out with the two line blurbs stuff, unfortunatly I think your dogs suck so won't be able to help out there. :P
How dare you insult my wonderful dog:
I can set publisher rights on the front page, so you can edit articles straight on the website. Gentalman Hal, if you’d like to be the first let me know.
How dare you insult my wonderful dog:
That is one foul demon beast of a dog!! hahah
Is there any way to allow for submissions by registered users on the main site, and have certain administrators, edit/approve those submissions? That would probably help get people to start contributing, also the first couple articles (could even be made sticky articles if that's possible), should just be pointers to some of the important wiki articles (IE: Getting Started even though there's a link right to the wiki, maybe a quick overview on the mambo front page could help).
Yes, that is the theory. Mambo allows for accounts to have various levels of permission, one being submission of articles for approval (in fact, I think this is default). Now's the time to test it out I suppose.
When I logged in, underneath the User Menu I clicked the Submit News button I got the following message:
You are not authorized to view this resource.
I logged in as:
username: dougnukem
It's probably just some little mambo permissions thing.
doug, it's a special permission just for you. 
doug, log out and log back in. You should have permission to submit news stories now.
WoooHOOO it worked!
Mark, I hope you don't mind the first article I posted was a news article refering to the blog post you wrote about multithreading in jME. (if the jME community or onlookers haven't read it yet, I hope this gets some more people thinking about concurrent programming, I'd really like to see jME built around a highly concurrent architecture)
Like I said I think for initial news items maybe we can just post relevant interesting articles from Mark and Renanse (and anyone elses) blog that discusses jME, and also any interesting articles in the wiki (dark frog's article about the StandardGame class is a good candidate).
I think it'll help put a presence out there on the front page if we publicize some of the internal community things.
Honestly if people knew how active these forums were, if somehow you could distill the information dished out here, and stick it on the front page, jME would attract so much attention (I think it already does).
Ok I'm done being the jME evangelist, at least for the night…haha let me know if I'm going overboard (seriously I talk about jME with fellow co-workers and other programmers interested in game development, mainly because of this active development community). I've never been involved in a lot of forums, mailing lists or use groups, but I feel like the jME community is somewhat unique (maybe all good open source projects are like this, and in that case I plan on checking them out).
Your news post is up, but the formatting is odd. It created a 8 page index, quite strange.
I certainly don't have a problem if you link to articles other people write. Also, any project news for applications that use jME (Bang! Howdy updates, other Open Source projects, etc). I'd say for now, post anything that sounds interesting, and after awhile it will start to sort itself out.
Regarding the Mambo plug-ins. I can install things, but you'll have to be very specific. I don't have a lot of free time to work on that sort of thing, so any legwork that others can take care of, I'd appreciate it.
I fixed the formatting (WARNING: those little flower “I” and “P” icons on the submit news article page insert new page markers I clicked them like crazy and didn’t see anything happen, and there’s no preview article function so I didn’t know it was messed up until it got posted).
I looked into adding RSS feeds to mambo, and it appears you can create “news feeds” that will spit out the contents of an RSS feed onto your mambo site, the only problem is it seems like you can only use it if you click the news feeds button, then select the category then the feed, I don’t know how you can make that specific news feed a content item by itself on the main page…
Basically in mambo admin go to Components>>News Feeds>>Manage News Feeds >> (Then create a new one with the button in the upper right)…
I’ll look into it more and if I can send you the steps to do it if I figure it out. (Mambo is such a counterintuitive beast to try to just use without looking up the documentation).
Check out my example here:
http://eventhorizongames.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_newsfeeds&catid=13&Itemid=7
6 months without news then 3 posts in one day! :-o
And yes, this Mambo thing really is counterintuitive 
in the same spirit, is it possible to change the info and screenshots on devmaster? those screens do not do jme justice 
Yes, we can update those… which 2 would you prefer to showcase?