I was doing some thinking tonight in the scope of “jMonkeyEngine as a community of pretty well versed modelers” and I had an idea. We’ve always wanted to make a ‘big time’ demo but its never really gotten off the ground either due to a lack of commitment from outside artists or the wherewithal to produce from within. We also see occasional threads saying “Im having trouble importing this asset, please help!” which usually devolves into “I’m giving up on jME” if it isn’t solved in a day or two.
So why not try to take care of some of these concerns? I propose we set up our own repository of jME-compatible models available in their original source (as well as exported) formats that would be made available under open licenses for folks to use.
It is my hope that bringing a new aspect like this to the community that we can accomplish a few things:
Provide working examples for newcomers to use in their own learning experiences and projects
Encourage new open-source projects (or at least projects using assets that are open and attributed to their authors)
Attract a broader audience of artists interested in creating games who may not have previously had an interest in jME
Encourage collaboration among users in the creation of models and thus, a general strengthening of the community
Sure, its a bit out of scope for a 'game engine', but one of the cool things about jME is that members are always pushing others to continue on with their own projects and to see things through to the finish. I think that the availability of solid assets could help us all in our pursuit to make great games as well as our hope to always attract new people to the jME project.
Sounds cool, so you also mean models that already exist but are under an open license and have been imported successfully in jME? And ofc contributions… We should definitely do something like that… Time to enable the groups documents plugin some time soon… But we’ll have to disable it manually in every other group, its enabled by default…
I didn’t even know we’d tracked down a document plugin! Yes, I would say that pre-made models working in jME are fine. If you figure that even just 2-3 users put up one piece of art a week that pretty soon someone will come along, so this combination of things, and have a light bulb moment where they think of some great idea for a game!
Sure it’s out of scope for a ‘game engine’, but we always imagined the jMonkeyEngine community to be a lot more than that, didn’t we? That’s why we applied BuddyPress
I’m really loving this idea of making our own directory of tried & tested jME resources. This coincides neatly with our earlier plans for an “Asset Pipeline” board group and the “jMonkeyPlatform asset packages”. Not only could we store assets here, we could store all available tools for assets, e.g. export/import scripts and so on.
It was sort of in between the lines of all of your points stated, but just to clearly state another great accomplishment that could come out of this:
Exemplify broader use of our new site's "groups" functionality. Currently we come off more as an oddly structured forum community. With projects like these we will gradually start taking advantage of BuddyPress' complete feature offering.
Ah yes, export scripts would be gold too. The associated forum would also be a nice container for all of those general “how do I import a <insert format here> model?”
Sounds like a good idea to me also. And i noticed another topic today about more collada support being supported so once I get some models going again I’d also like to try the collada import features as well.
It would be good for me to stay away from games for awhile, and work more towards making games / objects in my spare time
lwsquad said:
Sounds like a good idea to me also. And i noticed another topic today about more collada support being supported :) so once I get some models going again I'd also like to try the collada import features as well.
(...)
Could you link me to the topic that gave you that idea? We had some collada development being done by a couple weeks ago, but the developer left the community as a whole. @mulova has however been talking about looking into Collada for jME3, but we'll have to wait and see if he can find the time. It certainly would be an immensely important addition though.
Thanks for the input @loopies, we must be on to something here
@lwsquad sorry, but anything that’s “pgi’s” in that list has been discontinued. I don’t know why @normen neglected to remove them. These projects are still available, but in an unfinished state. Hopefully someone will either pick up where pgi left or start a new Collada/Blender project from scratch some time soon.
So I suppose we should iterate this idea a bit. In practice, how do you think we would best implement this? I think it goes beyond the ‘everything is a forum’ paradigm that is currently imposed in the BuddyPress structure, but if it provides us the best access to the document and collaboration plugins, then I say “sub-forum it!”
#1 - We apply the BuddyPress Group Documents plugin, only allowing group moderators to manage files in any way. We would be very lenient in giving people access; this is just so that other groups with this plugin enabled will not be crowded with uploads.
#2 - We make the group, including the forum component, snippets component and group docs component.
#3 - Forum is linked to from the forums tab
#4 - Group index is linked to in the “Open Source”, soon to be renamed “Tools”, projects list
#5 - Shortly after creation we should probably establish some wiki pages to complement our common practices. Just gotta see how all of this comes together first.
Add to or take away from it whatever you think looks right. I’ll be busy throughout this Thursday. If @lwsquad finishes his first work by the end of the day already then you’d probably be better off just going ahead and create the group (“Asset Club”, “Assets Pipeline”, “Assets Workshop”…, I dunno) so he can add his stuff there for an immediate kickstart. If not, I’d appreciate it if we could keep discussing this until at least the end of Friday.
This all makes sense, I actually forgot that part of my original rationale was that a forum dedicated to content would alleviate some of the model threads in other subforums!
It would be cool to have original source files from every modeling tool that we can get our hands on and then have the subsequent ‘best practice’ exports along with descriptions of exactly how we got from Blender → OGRE, Maya → OBJ, or whatever other tool/format is up for inspection…
This is, of course, all second tier to the ultimate aim of making great, open, assets available for everyone to use!
erlend_sh said:
Hopefully someone will either pick up where pgi left or start a new Collada/Blender project from scratch some time soon.
Oh, this blender imperter is *so* worthy to be picked up.. clean code, commented, documented.. I'd do it myself if I had not like.. 100 things I want to do jME-wise :cry:
I still like the idea of an asset club Don’t get me wrong in my idea to delay / cancel the city scene at its current development. I think it would be a good idea. And once I get more time with blender I think 3d content development will only get better (at least from my perspective ) . I’m really impressed at what I have seen tutorials for so far. I’m taking a lot of notes and still looking forward.
lwsquad said:
I still like the idea of an asset club :) Don't get me wrong in my idea to delay / cancel the city scene at its current development. I think it would be a good idea. And once I get more time with blender I think 3d content development will only get better (at least from my perspective ) . I'm really impressed at what I have seen tutorials for so far. I'm taking a lot of notes and still looking forward.
A very important step towards the "asset club" concept was just made with the introduction of AssetPacks. As for the assets group, we decided that just a straight forward board for asset import would be the most suitable and low-maintenance solution for our needs right now. Any assets that are shared can be made available either as a download via the contribution depot, or added to an AssetPack.
