I’ve just taken the first steps to moving JME3’s .blend loader into its own repository. That is, I’ve moved the jme3-blender project under jMonkeyEngine-Contributions into its own BlenderLoader repository:
…and kept all of the history in the transfer.
The next steps will be removing the jme3-blender directory from the main jme repo and fixing the build, tests, etc. to not mention it anymore. In a jme 3.4+ world, the blender loader will be separate.
This has long been on the roadmap as the loader only works for old Blender versions and breaks with each new version. Blender 2.8 is really great and the blender loader doesn’t even support it… meanwhile gltf continues to improve. (Edit: also there is some questionable GPL licensing in there for some removed files that could maybe come back if someone wanted the whole loader to be GPL. Others are of somewhat questionable pedigree as is.)
That being said, if someone wants to pick this up and maintain it, it’s there in its own repo and can have its own release cycles, etc… The barrier to entry for someone managing that project is considerably lower than “getting commit access” to jme’s main repo. If it’s to survive at all, this seems like the best way.
In the immediate term, I could really use someone’s help fixing the build there. It’s build.gradle file is the same one it had in the main jme3 repo and so refers to things that don’t exist, etc… I personally have no interest in fixing it and frankly I’m willing to just leave it in a broken state until it has a proper person to manage it going forward.
…but that seems a bit of a shame if someone is otherwise willing to step forward and at least fix that much. Then, for example, some future JME3.4 SDK could still choose to include it in its separated out form.
Over the next week or so, I’ll start removing the traces of it from the main repo.