Is there a place that has a list of the best practices for contributing code for jME (coding style and stuff like that)? If it exists there should be a sticky pointing to it in this forum…
Anyway, I've started to work on making a .x converter for jME, it's based off of one I wrote a year or two ago when I was working with just opengl bindings, I've been adjusting it to use jME classes for the things that are pretty much common (Vector3f and Vector2f etc). I'd like to be able to contribute it to jME when it's working, so I'm hoping to find out anything I need to know in advance about what needs to be done and how. I don't really suggest anyone rule out anything as being too noobish a mistake, like failing to provide some degree of commenting etc. I expect to post the actual code to the user code (or here) forum and let someone who knows what they are doing actually put it in CVS once it's acceptable.
In addition to the .x loader, I am planning to try to make a better JointController (I'll look into using the current one/extending it) as I'd like to be able to do a few things that just don't seem possibe or reasonable right now with what's in place.
Some specific things I'd want to know, is jME targetting the 1.5 compiler, can I use generics? Or should I stick with 1.4 syntax?
I am planning to get something going this weekend in terms of a working conversion program, but I do tend to get stuck on a lot of basic noob type issues with jME.
Current jme is using java 1.5.
Comments and javadocs are always nice :). jme's biggest short coming right now seems to be lack of documentation and tutorials.
If you are really worried about the style I would just look at some of the current code to get a sense of how it is done.
I don't really have much else to let you know. Both things you suggest working on are needed. Good luck with your project.
For the basic questions i'd suggest taking a look at the existing loaders / convertors (not to forget the work done by kman on cal3d and md5)
I couldn't get cal3d working, it seemed to be for a different version of jME than the CVS, I didn't look at the md5 loader. I expect I'll look at those at least for the way skeleton code was handled since at least cal3d supports weights as I understand it, and I'd like to do the same. I have most of the static model stuff converted over now, just got to put together some trimesh's and material states etc. The animation stuff will probably be hard since I'll most likely have to understand jME's trimesh stuff a lot better since I'm pretty sure I have to replace it to support weights.
Am I wrong to assume that once I have created a scene in jME with my loader I can export that scene to the jME format with the new exporter? And that assuming I implement Saveable it will save/load using my classes?
Well i don't have looked at the animation and model loading system in a while (and never was an expert) so for advanced questions and status of the systems i'd strongly recommend asking mojo and renanse as they are clearly the one's to give direction on best practices for jme.
The blender .x exporter doesn't seem to support exporting bone information, so this isn't likely to get done by me any time soon. I might still fool around with the joint controller but it seems pretty unlikely that I'll get anything done there at this point.