JME 3.8.0-stable Released

Development Engine Development
1

3.8.0-stable is now available!

project.ext {
  jmeVer = '3.8.0-stable' 
}
dependencies {
    implementation "org.jmonkeyengine:jme3-core:$jmeVer"
    ...
}

Full changelog here:
Release v3.8.0-stable · jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine

There are many significant changes since 3.7, too many to summarize concisely in this post.

But the biggest changes that come with 3.8 would be the changes to modularize jme’s PBR shaders as well as the addition of a new API to support custom Render Pipelines (big thanks to @codex for this contribution)

I recommend checking out this article to learn more: Render Pipelines in JME v3.8

Thanks to everyone who has helped test and contribute to this release. And big thanks to @sgold for guiding me and providing excellent documentation that made learning the release process much simpler than I expected.

With 3.8 stable released, we can now start working on a 3.9 release, and I plan to have the next alpha version available for testing sometime in the next few weeks.

17 Likes
2

Thank you for this @yaRnMcDonuts!

For 3.9 are there any jme3 examples or other similar tests that it would be helpful if I automated as screenshot tests? I can do a few more randomly but if there were ones that would have caught 3.8 issues I can prioritise them for example.

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thank you all for your efforts! :chimpanzee_cool: :rocket:

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Thank you @yaRnMcDonuts for managing the release!

And thanks to everyone else who contributed to it. Much appreciated.

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From my side as well. Thanks for this release and for managing it.
Outstanding work.

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It could be useful to have them for some of the PBR related tests like these ones:

TestPBRLighting.java
TestPBRSimple.java
PBRTerrainTest.java
PBRTerrainAdvancedTest.java

Although these screenshot tests may continuously need updated anytime any changes or bug fixes are made to the pbr shaders that intentionally cause even a slightly different render output. Hopefully this shouldn’t be a common occurrence, but it will likely happen at some point.

I’d also like to consider adding some new pbr assets and examples in 3.9 to better display jme’s current graphical potential, since right now there’s very few pbr assets in the test data library, I’m fairly sure that the only PBR assets are the tank and terrain in the examples I linked. I think it would be good to have a slightly more complex example/demo displaying a small polished PBR scene with post processing for a full demo of jme’s current capabilities. I’ll probably make another thread to discuss this more soon.

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7

It could be useful to have them for some of the PBR related tests like these ones:

Sure! Here’s a PR #2416 pbr screenshot tests by richardTingle · Pull Request #2417 · jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine · GitHub

(The source terrain examples have a very dim emissive texture, which seems a bit pointless, you can barely see it in the final render, but I’ve migrated “as is”)

Although these screenshot tests may continuously need updated anytime any changes or bug fixes are made to the pbr shaders that intentionally cause even a slightly different render output. Hopefully this shouldn’t be a common occurrence, but it will likely happen at some point.

Yes, this will happen (especially if there is a deliberate, visual change). Accepting new screenshots is very easy though. And it’ll be nice to have a visual diff in PRs

3 Likes