"Idea" about AssetStore for jME

Ill put it up tomorrow on github as im mainly working on the website side now anyway and hopefully those that are interested can give me a hand to get it done quicker :wink:

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Just some thoughts:

  1. There are companies that specialized on providing payment platforms (e.g. “Atlas” comes to my mind - I read an article in a magazine about them) - they provide a payment-service for other companies which use that service to make “micro payments” in their free-to-play games. There sure are web-shop-providers. The company where I’m hosting my website provides something like that. I’m not into websites, but I guess those who are, could find a provider for such services.

  2. I agree with @pspeed and others that paid stuff is a wonderful idea. Paying others for software libraries and game models and such is a good way to reward and respect other people’s work and to build a network and to give jME the opportunity to become more than a hobbyist platform.

  3. For similar reasons I created a wiki page that provides an overview on all available jME software libraries. @david_bernard_31 made something similar. Often we already have many things available but people need long time to find all the good stuff - it would also be perfect to put all these things in the free section.

  4. There are already some great assets. I was surprised what wonderful things are in the testdata .jar. But when I looked for the .blend original files (3D) or .psd original files (2D) I was disappointed - because like many times before, jME people don’t seem to care for organizing the assets and their original files. Not even the original files for the monkey and text on the default start screen are referenced anywhere. This is definitely a point which could be improved.

  5. There are already some nice asset packs (see AssetPack Browser in the SDK - I hope it will be continued, maybe by @Darkchaos or others). They suffer from the same problems like #4 and #3 - which means “no originals and source available” and “people can’t find them”.

  6. As people state often: Assets and Libraries are what turns a hobbyist engine into a “AAA” engine. Even though I think that this is only half true (many default features in UE and CryEngine separate those AAA engines from “AA” engines like our jMonkey). But there is some truth to that and we could get a “more than the sum of its parts” situation once a real asset store is available for us.

That said … this is one of the reasons why I hesitated to stick with jME for my procedural games. And it’s one of the reasons why I will most likely be making “HD versions” of my games with UE. But I think that we still have the potential, as a community, to gain a lot and a whole new level of professionalism by investing relatively little endeavour to reach that new level.

Happy coding,
:chimpanzee_smile:

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Even it can turn to be more than just a asset store! People can also put their game components there. (what Unity is doing).
for example say a full-featured “Health Component” which adds Health features to Spatial added.

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Which is completely dumb considering AAA games don’t use public assets at all…

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it was just about the concept “things become AAA because they use better art than others”. (and not having good assets available is what keeps many jME projects from becoming better than they could be)

You may be right that they do every art asset on their own (today).
On the other hand:
Just last week I noticed: “Hey, these companies like Rockstar and Ubisoft must have trillions of self-made assets by now - I think they will start trading them soon” and then just a couple days later I saw the ad for the Crytek asset bundle. ^^

Sorry for having written a dumb thing - I’m sure it won’t be the last dumb thing you read from me! :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:

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I will do. Especially updating the AssetPacks so we could synchronize them with the official Asset Store.
As far as #4 goes, it’s the users and not the system. For the testdata there might not even be a blend file, but only an ogre mesh :smiley: (Sometimes you see them in the tests, without any .j3o)

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I was not targeting you precisely, really. I apologize if you took it like that. I meant it’s dumb people do think like that… because they do…

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Sorry guys n gals, got slightly side tracked today. Went to buy a new work van and the traffic was murder getting home. Ill try my best to put the code up tomorrow.

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I pushed the thing to github.

https://github.com/jMonkeyEngine/JmeResources

I don’t have the whole list of things todo, there are @TODO’s in the project, but last thing I was working on was editing a resource…

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Hi
You can also consider blend4web framework for displaying blender 3d scene in browser.it needs no plugin in browser.

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Wowm I don’t know about this lib - Blend4Web till today. It will definitely help me in the future! Thanks!

Anyway, it’s for Blend file not our runtime format .j3o. Like blend file quite specific to python, the .j3o is very specific for java but both of them also can be interpreted in another language. Preview things first will help making decision before we trying to download or buy that assets.

This topic has a lot of ideas, hope it will push us a little futher in popularity… :smile:

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I have a site that will be offering quality game ready 3d models in obj. Format, and low poly, bvh animations and likes which will be up and running by the end of tomorrow.

The site is still under development, the models are there already I just haven’t put a download link to any
http://vtsdemozone.org/low-poly-3d-models/

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So in my opinion, an asset store with free 3d. Models will work provided the store simply displays thw models then directs to an external site for the download

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IMHO the assets should be free and only free. Not only does paid bring issues to JME like others stated already Paid also bring issue to developers who wish to make either paid or open source games with JME. Personally I dislike asset stores in general it creates a atmosphere of many same looking games often but I do think a purely free asset store would be great for developers in the development process and they can’t do art themselves which allows for them to further test their game with actual art.

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I think it’s bright starting with free assets. If it ended there, it would already be great.

But I think being welcoming to paying assets might have a nice effect nobody talked about yet: people that have great assets made for other engines might wanna adapt their stuff for jme to find new customers ^^.

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Why that? I think the topic is about giving people the possibility to sell their stuff, rather than forcing them to use a license rather than another.
What i mean is: you can release a free asset that cannot be used for commercial works, and you can sell an asset that can be redistributed in any form.

That’s true, it’s not really a good idea to buy your main character or any kind of story/gameplay fundamental asset, but i don’t see any problem in buying some “environmental” assets, mostly if you are doing a game with a lot of them.

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The models in the asset store must be working properly and completely with jMonkey. It is quite difficult at times to convert them and/or get them to work properly as intended, and as such, all models available must work as intended - so there is peace of mind that you don’t go through all the usual hassle.

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Does this mean everything will be in j3o format? If so, how will you handle the fact that the j3o files contain paths relative to a project?

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Everything must be bundled in a single jar (which is just a .zip file really) - that contains the model and textures required for it to work, so it should all be there and working just by adding a simple maven dependency (or downloading the jar and adding it if that’s the way you play).

Assets are not just models, though. They can be textures and sounds too.

So if you wanted to add the jaime monkey or the ogre or the ninja for example, you just add a dependency and it’s there, fully working, fully functional - simple as that. No importing, no messing around. Simple. Easy.

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I see one problem: most build managers (I don’t know about maven, I am talking mostly about IntellIJ Idea’s built-in system) take ~500ms to process a dependency per build. Using a large number of store-bought assets could quickly balloon build times to several minutes which is obviously not a good thing.

Perhaps it would be better to create some sort of other binary asset format (perhaps “rja” for redistributable jMonkeyEngine asset) that would include all of the information (textures, meshes, etc.) that are needed? I don’t imagine such a thing being difficult to create as the AssetManager could be easily modified to handle an additional format.

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