Hi, I'm new to this game engine and I tried it out with Eclipse, but I failed. It's sort of "lags", as some people call it, when I use Eclipse. I was wondering if there's another way of using the JME Game Engine? Such as a JAR file, or maybe even a batch file? Something other than an IDE that doesn't take up so much CPU usage. I'm running on a celeron processor with 256 MB of RAM and it's very slow. Would anyone help me out as to how I could get JME running? And is the Eclipse part just optional? Thanks.
I personally use Eclipse, however, my ram is 1744 MB higher than yours, so that could explain things. Sometimes eclipse will take 100 MB of ram alone.
Other people use a program called Netbeans, perhaps it isnt as laggy?
I believe neither option is mandatory.
Yes you can get a jar file to include in your projects.
See here: http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/downloads/list
Being a java library, you can use it as with any other java library: include the jars in the classpath when you compile your project, include the jars and set the java.library.path variable when you run the the program (the variable part is required because JME2 uses some native library).
In JME2 stable, the jar files you need to use are in the "lib" sub-folder of the distribution pack (unzipped). The native libraries that you have to use with the java.library.path variable are in the "native" sub-folder of the opengl backend, also included in the JME2 distribution, always in the lib folder.
To make things a bit easier you can create an empty folder in your filesystem and put in that folder all the jar files and the native libraries you find in the JME2 distribution. With that setup you can compile a program from the command line saying:
javac -cp .;thefolder/* -d . .java
and run the program with a command like:
java -cp .;thefolder/ -Djava.library.path=thefolder TheMainClassOfYourProject
which is, in therm of ram, the cheapest way to compile/execute a java project.
For JME3 (still alpha but works great) it is the same but for the java.library.path thing (jme3 extracts and points the native libraries by itself).
The main problem is your amount of RAM, and I really cannot see any solutions for IDE to recommend… The problem is that todays IDEs have quite a lot of features that really helps you to develop fast, concentrating fully on building a solution, like code completion and suggestion, debugger, syntax highlight, templates, plugins, etc. And for all this to work you need a lot of RAM…
So it is always like a matter of helpful features vs your RAM that you will have to deal with.
You can use some simple text editor with syntax highlight and you won't need a lot of RAM and CPU to run it, but you will have a lot of pain to build and run, trace bugs and etc. that way, that will slow down your productivity.
It's like a huge field that needs to be "dig" before you can grow something - you can do it with a shovel using only your hands, but in that case it will take like a year to do it 
If you're on Windows I would try a combination of Notepad++ and a batch file of the commands mentioned by PGI. Its a pretty functional program out of the box and can be brought closer to an IDE through its plugin library.
On *nix I would just use Vi as it is clearly the best text editor in the world
If you have some spare money, and really want to do something, I would invest in a better pc or at least 1 gig of ram.
It's the most simple and most efficient solution.
If money is short you have no (serious) choice but notpad++.
Empire Phoenix said:
If you have some spare money, and really want to do something, I would invest in a better pc or at least 1 gig of ram.
It's the most simple and most efficient solution.
If money is short you have no (serious) choice but notpad++.
If it's a PC then yes, investing in RAM (if it's physically possible to add more) sounds good, but if it's an old notebook, then there could be only two - by a new PC/notebook or use texteditor+command_line, but it's soooooo unproductive, imho...
Or Maven+a decent text editor.