Now that renanse has taken more or less a back seat in the development process, I wonder how we will be / should be organizing the patching and changes to jME? So far renanse pretty much kept an eye on everything on the board and if there was a patch posted to some bug, he picked it up looked at it and installed it if he agreed with the reasoning.
However I guess this will change now? Anyways I wanted to throw this in the air as soon as possible so that people could think about it… Should we start posting the patch requests to the googlecode issues list so that they would not be overlooked? Or will someone step up to keep a more close eye on the forum? I do not want to pressure anyone… I just wish to minimize the impact renanse’s move will make.
If possible could the devs also comment on the future development of jME 2.0… It always seemed to me that renanse was the one who had the big picture and kept thing moving in that direction… But what will happen now?
Any and all comments would be very welcome.
I keep an eye on the Physics section as well as InputHandler- and JMEDesktop-related stuff. But in contrary to my early developer days I cannot read all posts on all the boards any more (due to lack of spare time and because of the community growth).
So any physics-, input- and ui-related patches and/or tricky problems posted in the appropriate sections should draw my attention. If (when :)) I neglect an important topic, don't hesitate to PM me.
Patches should not be a problem in those areas. But I must admit that I did not actively develop anything jME related lately :|, so I'm definitely not a driving force amongst the devs… All the devs have some kind of "big picture" of jME in their minds, though.
in 2 days only 1 developer has chimed in… sigh… well, either I am only imagining a problem and everyone is too happy with the current working system to even listen to a doomgloomer like me… or this is a pretty bad sign…
Being an optimist by nature, actually, I will leave it at this. I trust you guys know what you are doing.
Well renanse was pretty much the only active (as in actively developing and comitting) developer in the past months.
Sure there are llama, mr. coder, irrisor, darkfrog etc. and other community contributions who add the occasional feature and bugfixes.
jME is an OpenSource project, so people will sometimes work more or less on it.
If they currently work on it as part of their daily job or if they actively develop a game or application as a hobby then they of course invest more time in jme and contribute more.
I think what would be good is the devs would maintain a tasklist (issue tracker on google code?) with open tasks (the , so that people interested in contributing to jme, can see what needs to be done jme 2 todo list, what bugs needs to be fixed etc. and grab an issue.
The patch could be posted as an issue attachement, then a developer would need to take a look at it and decide if it can be commited or not.
Maybe another developer should be added, preferably someone that can do what Renanse specialised in.
Count me out as being a candidate, but ill vote if anyone nominates themselves.
give it time guys,if I remember clearly some of the devs had new members added to their families plus if you've read renanse blog lately some may even have higher things on their list of priorities for some time, so… give it time… relax 
thanks for the comforting words 
It was time for me to start working on an engine I believe is the future, for real game development, so that's what I've done. I have talked for a long time about abdicating from my dev status, but has been convinced not to by other devs. I'll gladly do so though to someone more inclined to add patches, if the number of devs can't be upped.
MrCoder said:
It was time for me to start working on an engine I believe is the future, for real game development, so that's what I've done. I have talked for a long time about abdicating from my dev status, but has been convinced not to by other devs. I'll gladly do so though to someone more inclined to add patches, if the number of devs can't be upped.
Are you implying jme isnt "for real game development" ?
I'll gladly do so though to someone more inclined to add patches, if the number of devs can't be upped.
I suppose I can be added as dev only so that I can occasionally make a bug fix or add a small feature while working on my game. Don't expect me to do the kind of updates renanse been doing :|
I'm with Mindgamer-- this is becoming more worrysome.
Of course I write only in JME 1.0, so it won't affect me quite as much…
theprism said:
Are you implying jme isnt "for real game development" ?
From my experience, using jME at work for at least 4 years trying to make various games, it's not optimal. It works ok, but has issues. In my opinion it's built more as a textbook school example on learning OO programming (which scenegraphs show so nicely), than an engine really made from requirements coming from experienced game developers. It has a very bloated core etc.
Still, I love it for doing various experiments and it will definitely serve as inspiration in many ways for the engine I've started on now...
i'm sure (it has been proven many times) it works very well for prototypes and hobby/indie games.
But professional games will (probably, i have absolutely no experience in that field) always have a engine who is built (not necessarily from scratch of course) exactly for this one game.
i guess an engine like jME be improved best, if experienced developers use the engine to make a game and contribute fixes and improvements to the core back.
But its in very solid state right now i think anyway.
Core-Dump said:
i'm sure (it has been proven many times) it works very well for prototypes and hobby/indie games.
But professional games will (probably, i have absolutely no experience in that field) always have a engine who is built (not necessarily from scratch of course) exactly for this one game.
i guess an engine like jME be improved best, if experienced developers use the engine to make a game and contribute fixes and improvements to the core back.
But its in very solid state right now i think anyway.
I guess this is right. An engine is nothing without the games that are made with it. This is also true for the tools around an engine. To improve the engine, the community should create a game and then adding things to the engine, that are needed.
So i would say we need an official jME reference implementation.
Vacancy
Someone to do patches …
kevglass said:
Developer-wise, I reakon the devs do a good job of ticking over patches already. The todo list is what needs tackling, but I guess thats possible as a community.
Well that is exactly what I meant - so far the patching worked very well, but renanse was the one who did it... and since he is gone, we might need a 'system' for doing patching, if we cannot come up with a 'mini-ren' who can do the same stuff alone.
One Question: What is mojomonk doing? Did he switch to an other project/engine too?
A project always needs an architect or a group of a few seasoned developers to keep things going smooth , to have a big picture, maintain roadmap, goals and such. The biggest problem would be if the integrated nature of the engine falls apart into little pieces of concurrent developments.
So if not one person but multiple less 'mastermind' candidates could form a core team it could take up this role somehow.
And yeah 1.0 vs 2.0 is a core question as well…
So i don't think jME needs a new mastermind but some who are willing to form a core team.
timong said:
A project always needs an architect or a group of a few seasoned developers to keep things going smooth , to have a big picture, maintain roadmap, goals and such. The biggest problem would be if the integrated nature of the engine falls apart into little pieces of concurrent developments.
So if not one person but multiple less 'mastermind' candidates could form a core team it could take up this role somehow.
And yeah 1.0 vs 2.0 is a core question as well...
So i don't think jME needs a new mastermind but some who are willing to form a core team.
I second that
I Nominate KevGlass as developer