I’m a total noob at JMonkey (though I have quite a lot of .Net and Java experience) but have spent a couple of weeks playing around. Apart from the problems it’s been a lot of fun trying to work the framework out.
JMP3 (Alpha 3) is installed on a windows 7 virtual machine running on a MacBook Pro notebook, there is 2G of memory allocated to the virtual machine.
I am developing in eclipse because of (1) below.
I’ve experience a number of problems, the most pressing being
JMP3 memory consumption and CPU thrashing. This gets so bad that the IDE is unusable. Is this something others experienced or have I done something really silly?
The NiftyGui examples work really well on their own (Looked really sharp and stood out) but when I rewrote them to render through the JMonkey API the controls looked terrible. The colors were patchy and bled past the control boundaries, the effects didn’t work etc.
I have an Nvidia graphics card on the Mac the drivers are up to date (they should be kept up to date by a scheduled update from apple).
VMFusionware had this to say about their graphics
Enable 3D graphics for the following virtual machines:
• Windows XP: DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1
• Windows Vista and Windows 7: DirectX 9.0EX with Aero and OpenGL 2.1
I using Windows 7.
I don’t understand why the rendering is perfect when done directly from Nifty, but degrades when done through the JMonkey-Nifty API.
I have just noticed that it also affects the SceneViewer in the GDE. The welcome screens have repeated text, controls misaligned with their containers, clickable controls not working etc.
I just tend to develop more on widows (I don’t feel so bad about thrashing it around).
I think that this is the driver that windows sees VMware SVGA 3D driver from MS. If there is no way round I guess I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and develop on the Mac
jMonkeyEngine3 requires full OpenGL2 compatibility which a simulated environment seldom delivers (despite what the manual or simulated graphics card say).