Getting started in JMonkeyEngine

[sgold]

I believe we do. @RiccardoBlb manages our servers. He would know for sure.

[RiccardoBlb]

@richtea

Spring boot provide a utility where you give it some basic information and it produces a zip that is a starter project that you just open in any friendly IDE. Would that bridge the gap?

That’s actually a great idea. I think something like that would be extremely useful for everyone, not just beginners, and we could extend it to support community libraries (eg. guis, physics etc.),

@richtea

Not sure what https://jmonkeyengine.org/ is written in, is it traditional html + js (and I’m seeing some md files) with no active server side?

You are right jmonkeyengine.org is just a client side website (that uses hugo for templating), hosted on github pages, we chose that to have a front page that could stay on even if we had problems on our backend, however we have a server to support everything else, so server side support is not an issue, we can provide that.

I would still prefer this to be a client side app, if possible, since it is easier to maintain and more secure.
Or it could be a serverside app with rest interface and a js frontend that we can integrate in our site.
However if you have other plans, do as you wish, we run docker containers on the server so there is no constraint on the language etc… once the app is ready i can help with containers and integration so don’t worry about that.

If you need to contact me on DMs or discord, feel free to do that.

[richtea]

Awesome. I’ll have a play and see what I can come up with.

That’s actually a great idea. I think something like that would be extremely useful for everyone, not just beginners, and we could extend it to support community libraries (eg. guis, physics etc.),

That was what I had in mind, “What gui library would you like to use” and list Lemur (probably selected by default), Nifty gui etc

I would still prefer this to be a client side app, if possible, since it is easier to maintain and more secure.
Or it could be a serverside app with rest interface and a js frontend that we can integrate in our site.

Yes, I’m thinking either full client side, or client + rest calls to a spring boot application. One thing that pushes me in the direction of the client + rest calls is it might be nice for the application to query maven central for the most recent minor version within preset major versions, so it will always start users on modern versions of stuff and we won’t be constantly tinkering with the versions it outputs (I haven’t found an API that would give me that information yet though). (Also creating dynamic zips client side in javascript doesn’t fill me with glee even though I accept that it is possible)

[oxplay2]

Myself i use Gradle in any IDE i like.

SDK i use only for assets managing.

Well for new people it could be easier to use SDK, but i belive they were often discouraged because of some sdk bugs (at least i tell for myself since beginning, idk if many of them still exist)

Gradle is not scary, i were learning it too. But it need to be provided first as working example (like it is in current webpage geting-started)

[RiccardoBlb]

@richtea

it might be nice for the application to query maven central for the most recent minor version within preset major versions, so it will always start users on modern versions of stuff and we won’t be constantly tinkering with the versions it outputs (I haven’t found an API that would give me that information yet though). (Also creating dynamic zips client side in javascript doesn’t fill me with glee even though I accept that it is possible)

Right, those are valid use cases.
If it can help, i think we shouldn’t even try to support old browsers, using modern javascript apis will make this much easier for sure.

[JhonKkk]

I still use the SDK (although many people know that there are many problems with the SDK), one of the reasons I insist on using the SDK is to facilitate development, because the SDK can package the desktop version and the android version with one click, so that I can debug the desktop during the development phase Version, and then directly ported to the android version. In addition, the SDK provides visualization tools to help me build the game scene. I know that blender can also be used to build the scene, but I need to add some flags to the scene, and I will frequently modify the scene, use blender to frequently modify and export and then load it into jme not convenient…

[JhonKkk]

Thank you SDK developers for continuing to maintain the SDK

[JhonKkk]

Too true , many potential bugs of the SDK discourage many novices.

[Darkchaos]

@pspeed

Need an “SDK plugins for dummies” or something.

@glh3586

My biggest issue with the existing SDK has been its extensibility. It would be great if there was a way to extend its functionality without having to figure out how to make netbean plugins.

Actually I got you covered, I wasn’t aware that someone is having problems there.
It may be outdated (even still using travis), but: GitHub - MeFisto94/nbproject
Looking at it now, it doesn’t seem correct because it has the files in two folders, that was probably before I knew what I was doing (you’d be a fool if you’d believe me I know now ).

There’s actually https://github.com/MeFisto94/jme3-artificial-intelligence/blob/master/build.gradle
and GitHub - MeFisto94/av-capture

@glh3586

To be fair, I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to build a plugin for the existing SDK but it is a little above my head on how to make that even work. I think the farthest I ever got was when I built it into the SDK itself but I had to scrap that when everyone pushed me into making it a plugin instead of replacing the existing emitter.

That’s basically correct, to build the module, it needs to be in-tree (part of the suite), at least that’s what I used to do. Now you “just” need to extract the plugin into it’s own repo and pull the SDK and build against it.

Note that the above plugins only compile against the engine and netbeans itself, not against the SDK, for which you’d need to build the SDK as well. I’ll try to get this more smooth with more recent versions, though, as we don’t need to compile the engine our own anymore.

[richtea]

I created a prototype of the JMonkey initalizer. To avoid derailing this thread I’ve added a separate topic on it at JMonkey Initializer

[Damjan94]

I started fiddling with jmonkeyengine about an month ago.
The sdk seems fine(completed almost all the tutorials without a problem).
The tutorials that were giving me a headache were the ones that import the assets. The wiki doesn’t explain how to import jmonkey assets using gradle, so I made a pr to the docs.
I’m a hobbyist, so I’m probably not using any advanced features, but I have made simple android apps in android studio(intelliJ), and I don’t think there’s any features that the jmonkey sdk is missing, compared to that IDE…