JME 3.8.0-alpha1 Available for Testing!

yaRnMcDonuts · December 31, 2024, 11:32am

The first alpha release of 3.8 is now available!

If you would like to help test, just update your gradle script: jmeVer = '3.8.0-alpha1'
Or download the new jars if you are using ant.

Full release notes are here:

I still have plans to merge a few other PRs and finish a few of my own for the next alpha release, so there should still be more new and exciting features to come. And if there are any open PRs or features you’d like to try to get added before we reach the beta phase and feature cut-off point, feel free to comment below.

But here are a few notable new things to mention in v3.8.0-alpha1 that could use testing:

Bug fix for PBRLighting.frag that will make models render closer to the khronos pbr standards. Please report any unintended visual bugs when using PBRLighting.j3md
TangentBinormalGenerator was deprecated. MikktSpaceTangentGenerator was moved out of “expiremental” status and made the default in all engine examples. Here is a list of the updated examples that could use testing: TangentsTestList
There were a few recent PRs related to the animation system, and I already found one bug that requires further investigating (easy to work around, but still important to fix): Exception playing Animation without ArmatureMask · Issue #2341
New API that allows custom rendering pipelines to be used instead of the default forward pipeline. This should allow for some much newer and more advanced rendering options and I’m excited to see what jme users manage to create with this (big thanks to @codex): Adds Custom Render Pipeline Interface #2304

And many more bug fixes and new features listed in the full release notes

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this 3.8 release so far, and thanks especially to @sgold for helping and teaching me the release process.

And thanks in advance to anyone who helps test this first release. I’ve already done some testing myself, and I’m happy to say that (aside from the minor animation error reported above) I have managed to use 3.8.0 alpha1 in my own game and editor projects with no other notable issues or crashes. So hopefully this alpha version will be as kind to your projects as it has been to mine

richtea · December 31, 2024, 1:38pm

Nice! Thank you!

A PR I wouldn’t mind having considered is #2279 screenshot tests by richardTingle · Pull Request #2280 · jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine · GitHub. This is the screenshot based testing I talked about at Screenshot based JME testing.

My hope is that it will make us more confident releasing more often in the future (it only has 5 tests in it so far but if the overall approach is approved I’ll add more)

yaRnMcDonuts · December 31, 2024, 1:59pm

Yeah I think screenshot testing would be useful for a lot of things, it would actually already have been useful in regards to the PBRLighting bug fix I mentioned. Being able to see a screenshot of the same scene/model before and after would be nice, since it is a very subtle but still apparent change.

I’ll add your PR to the 3.8.0 milestone. It looks good to me, but anyone else can review it if they’d like, and unless anyone raises any issues it can be merged prior to the next alpha release.

yaRnMcDonuts · January 2, 2025, 8:16am

Another useful PR I’d like to merge for the next alpha release is this one that’s been open for over a year and adds support for multiple monitors, so full screen mode will no longer be limited to the primary monitor.

github.com/jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine

Add support for Multiple Monitors in jme-LWJGL3 #2030

jMonkeyEngine:master ← bob0bob:master

opened 03:30AM - 05 Jun 23 UTC

bob0bob

+2367 -1581

Add support for multiple monitors. Add a feature so that when a "Full Screen" w…indow is created, that you can tell it which monitor to create the window on. Add a feature so that the application can call context to get a list of monitors that OPENGL found. It returns them in an ArrayList so that the programmers can select a monitor from the list. JME will take the pos of the monitor from the arraylist to get its handle. So if you have 2 monitors, you will have 2 in the list. So to tell JME which monitor to create the window on it would be 0 or 1. The array position in the list. The thought behind this is the program gets a list of monitors and then they can use that list in their settings for the user to select which monitor to us. Since the ID of the monitor changes between each launch, I went with the position from the arraylist that it returned. So many if user changes the order of the monitors then the program will launch on a different screen. Minor. Added in AppSettings a way to get/set Monitor. Monitor value is used only when creating a Full Screen.

Any final reviews are appreciated, but the author of the PR has been inactive and likely won’t be back to make any changes, so I don’t intend to hold up the merging process unless any major issues are pointed out. Any refactoring or code cleaning can be deferred to a future date in separate PRs.