Jmonkey workflow and questions

21

I see you never made games with mainstream 3D engines.
Materials almost never comes from Blender cycles, but mainly from painting programs like photoshop, substance painter and many others, so anyone should be able to create materials in the 3D editor and drag and drop them in the 3D editor as easy and fast as that.

3D engines can use 3D models that can come from any 3D modelers, lot of people uses Maya, Modo, Max or open source modelers, not only Blender.
So the common exhange format among 3D engines is FBX or Collada, not a format tied to a specific modeler.
Same for collisions import limited to Blender.

I don’t understand why JME3 workflow is so limited and tied to Blender ?
https://jmonkeyengine.github.io/wiki/jme3/external/blender.html
And many other options only available with Blender.
JME3 will definitively limit the users base because of that.
(lot of people that don’t like Blender interface and views uses Maya or others modelers).

22

alright… be gone already…

23

It felt like we had this discussion a million times already. So let’s get clear :smiley:

First, that engine was built whit the love and unpaid work of the many little dev who will get defensive of their baby. Its the maternal instinct, and frankly whit that kind of comment I can underhand why. Plus, when you look at the quality of what is done here, I think that if you can’t do something pretty on JME, its simply cause you don’t have the skills :confused:

Second: JME is a dev orientated game engine. It allows you to do a lot of crazy stuff if you have knowledge of what the actual f*** you are doing. If you are not a dev, don’t want to be one, just go make a clone on Unity. Why even ask questions when you know the answer?

Unity is a big business build around people like you, and its fine, but don’t go and shit on people stuff just cause it ain’t what you looking for :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:

24

This is like a bum asking you to pay for his insurance after you gave him a few dollars… wtf… Captain Obvious is telling us that commercial game engines have better tools :chimpanzee_facepalm:

How about “Hey guys, cool that you made all this available for free, its not quite my cup of tea because of this and that” (actually better shut up entirely then) - or even “Yo guys, cool engine, I made some tools that could move this closer to UDK and Unity, heres a PR for those, have fun! And thanks that I didn’t have to build my own engine from the ground up!”

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25

I let down, you guys are so closed to what should be a 3D engine, that you even not consider making life lot more easy for users with materials drag and drop or un universal format support instead of beeing closed to Blender.
Well nevermind.

26

@MonkeyGroove you understood wrongly perhaps. It is just the lack of resources. I’m sure that if somebody did create the tools and features you wanted, they would be happily accepted & merged. Now maybe even more so since the actual engine is parted from the SDK (the drag & drop tools etc.).

Simply put, ain’t nobody got time for that.

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27

So why are you not doing it?? We keep saying that you just need to provide the code and we’ll add it to the engine and/or SDK.

Well I know the answer - because its a lot of work and you don’t have endless spare time - guess what? we don’t either!!

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28

“I let down, you guys are so closed to what should be in a free dinner, that you even not consider making steak available for everyone at the table.”

By the way, if you find a universal format then I’m sure the world would love to hear about it. The closest so far is the proprietary FBX.

Please go troll somewhere else.

Edit: P.S.: as others have said, if you are willing to bring the steak then we’d all love to have it…

29

JME have what my friend calls “noobshield.” Leaving aside whether it is good or not, in the end we have a nice community here in this forum.

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30

But as long as you (not actually @FrozenShade but rather the OP in this case) are willing to learn instead of spitting insults you can receive a lot of help and go from n00b to pro.

Oh, with the @thetoucher exception… his are another kind of insults and have their place here. :slight_smile:

31

While that’s all nice and good, I have to say that not all of us are such programming geniuses like you Normen and can’t just simply turn free time into great new engine features.

Simply put, an idiot with unlimited free time still won’t deliver you a fusion reactor no matter how much he wants to. That’s why I don’t ever contribute anything real.

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32

Lens flare :smiley:

33

Yeah if my implementation didn’t look like someone smeared some colors randomly across the screen…

34

None of us came out of the womb coding great contributions to open source projects.

We coded our own projects, failed, coded another project, failed, coded another project failed… found some bug in an open source project, hunted it down, submitted a patch, received feedback, went into deep depression for a few hours, realized they were right, submitted a different version, repeat a few times, develop a thicker skin…

We set out to add some feature, spent hours on it here and there, for weeks, only to have someone faster swoop in with a better version when we were only half way done. Gained further understanding that the code base doesn’t care about our feelings, it just wants to be better.

We produced some of our own open source add-ons to something. Sometimes they were accepted. Sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes we were humble enough to receive feedback and learned to make it better.

In our professional and open source lives, we slowly learned to break big things into smaller things working towards an end. Surgical strikes that would get us closer to some end goal. Smaller patches that are not only more palatable to a group of gatekeepers but also objectively better over all.

Now, the problem is that folks like that generally have lots of their own itches to scratch… and if they don’t align with some feature like “drag and drop coding” like Unity or “implement the adapter for the next big 3D file format” then nothing gets done on those fronts. However, there is a giant gulf between noob and expert where folks can still contribute… by submitting smaller updates, asking for feedback, developing thicker skins, etc… That person really just has to care enough and be willing to devote a piece of themselves to the process.

It’s rare but it happens. Even here. We have quite a few really talented monkeys that help out in lots of ways. (I started to name names but worried I’d leave someone out by accident.)

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35

About the general “issue” - what pspeed said. Anyone who can code at least a bit can help and/or learn to help more. Even learning how to do a proper troubleshoot request is helpful - because only with a proper troubleshoot request we can see what (maybe) causes trouble for people. That way we can adapt the code (or simply put bigger warning signs ;)) or at least the next guy with this issue has a nice forum thread to refer to.

But hey, nobody here is a genius - if you dig deep enough in the engine you’ll probably find lots of messy code all around the engine by all of us (and especially in the SDK :smiley: ). And even if our code is good - wouldn’t that be even more of a reason to NOT start nitpicking about what we provide for free?

Especially from my experience with the SDK I can say that this kind of behavior is SERIOUSLY counter-productive. Basically saying “this would be much better if it was totally different” or “this is pathetic compared to other existing things” IS NOT an incentive to do more free work - its the opposite.

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36

And this is also the opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to @pspeed @Momoko_Fan @nehon @normen @Sploreg @t0neg0d @erlend_sh and a lot of others… without you I wouldn’t be able to actually enter the wonderland of game development… or at least not in the way I currently do :smiley:

Of course, I miss some of you and hope to see you again!

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37

Just my two cents. How it went with me: long time ago, being at school, I met 3ds (it wasn’t even Max by that time). Those were the times of 486 processors and modems for personal network access at best, and it happened to me to get 3ds for free. I really loved 3ds - well, I still love it - everything so polished in interface, everything worked (well, almost everything, but since certain version they fixed boolean operations finally), unlimited quality of renderings - etc etc. Years passed, and once it happened to me and my friend to wish to code a game (and we had Internet already) - and that was where troubles appeared. Being able to do everything I wanted with few clicks in 3ds I realized that it was using constantly changing proprietary format, and everything more common you could export to (say, .obj) is seriously limited. Finally we had to export to .ase (autodesk ascii) and write our own loader, providing material components separately - so that reflects of what’s happening when you are bound to something proprietary. It is all well and good until you want one little step to the side - you have to do TREMENDOUS amount of work to make it happen, typically. That’s why I switched to GIMP instead of Photoshop even when I am under Windows. Photoshop is also well polished and very powerful (speaking of performance, Adobe did really well), but once… Once I got Photoshop’s interface completely changed, just because Adobe decided to do so. So I had to find out what is where again - and this same thing happened to Max at least twice from my experience. Speaking of JME, if I use 3.0 (like I do now) - I still can ask here of what’s wrong, with Photoshop the answer would be: pay us again and get new version (with changes you didn’t need), as the one you use is not supported. This same thing is still happening, even with the best of proprietary technologies, my most recent experience here was with Android. My gf told me she didn’t like her new clock after her phone got an update (that clock’s really weird, I agree with her) - so I thought, oh, well, it’s Android, must be easy to make your own clock widget with necessary font. Oh, really? NOWHERE NEAR IT. Android doesn’t like custom fonts natively, but you can load manually, render onto canvas and feed it to widget, ok. What you can’t get easily is an update every time minute changes - a precise update. You can’t intercept corresponding system message just because Google decided not to let you - well you can, if you write couple of services restarting receivers when Android decides to kill them and do a lot of unnecessary checks just not to miss it - a holy hell redundant infrastructure just for a goddamn clock!
That sort of thing would never ever happen in JME, and that’s why I personally love it. *end of story

p.s. And that thing happened in Android EXACTLY because they targeted the SDK not at developers, but at people who want to work like “Bang! Bang! Bang! → Production!” and therefore enabling that message interception would quickly lead to massive complains sort of “why my 1st and automatically the best on market app consumes so much battery?” *urge to kill

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38

Bla bla bla , i make Android games already and sell them with other engine and some other mainstream 3D engine.
Some 2D other 3D, made with help of plugins others without and it just works , i concentrate on the game , the editor is complete with a modern workflow and tools.
That’s the difference between people putting lot of time coding missing tools or missing editor features and other people using prooven 3D software concentrating in the game content instead.
Well it’s the way of open source to be appropriate to coders and less appropriate to people concentrating lot more on making the game content instead.

39

Please just go away.

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40

Looks like they didn’t make you a lot of money if you’re looking into saving money by using open source software now. :chimpanzee_rolleyes:

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