Would love to know what you developers have planned in the near future
If by near term you mean the next few days… I just finished off standard Bump mapping (non-shader dot3 method for older cards) which may go into cvs next week. I'm also polishing off some Geometry tools that condenses mesh data (ie merging duplicate vertices and soon creating strips.) I should also have TriangleBatch expanded out to handle strip, fan, etc. meaning we'll finally have a replacement for the dumped CompositeMesh. (yay!)
wow, sounds really good ( feels like christmas ).
Am i right in thinking that with triangular strips/fans, if you create walls out of strips rather than quads you get better shading
When can we expect all the collada model support? 
darkfrog
Collada 1.4 support, SkinNode, BoneAnimation, improved ASE support and other such fun stuff are all sitting here waiting for decisions from NCsoft as to how they will get back to the community. ASE will likely go in as it is not a new feature. The others may be jME extensions with some kind of license. The powers that be (not Mark or myself) have not decided yet. Generally I leave it up to Mark though to decide what to check into CVS from our work code so that way it's "all his fault"… really, it is! erm, yeah… Plus if I check into CVS from my machine, the modified cvs files mess up our Perforce and Eclipse setup for some reason.
kidneybean said:
Am i right in thinking that with triangular strips/fans, if you create walls out of strips rather than quads you get better shading
Perhaps? I'm doing it more for the decrease in geometry data and the supposed increase in render speed.
"The others may be jME extensions with some kind of license. "
What that could be; money, some restricitions about usage, closed source?
Also could you give us some clues about what NCsoft's future plans about JME?
thank you
Ahmet
"(non-shader dot3 method for older cards) "
YEeeeeHAaaaww! (you know old cards is all I care for :) )
Thank you thank you
ahmetyetgin
(easy nick to remember ) must say collada Blender's exporter does not support bones animation yet. Just in case you use Blender. For scenery, surely collada is great.
The plans for JME? It's BSD license, your safe using it, I think And it has the best engine comunity. ;)
NCsoft (as any company or individual) is free to contribute to jME in many different ways. One way would be to contribute directly to the core which we are maintaining with a BSD license. I do not see that changing anytime soon. jME's core should always be free to use.
Another way to donate though is to package a contribution as an addon similar to JGN, jme-physics, etc. The license of an addon does not need to be BSD, and it is likely commercial entities such as NCsoft that have spent several thousand dollars paying a programmer would not donate large brand new pieces of functionality (such as a skin-and-bones system) as free-for-all BSD code. That said, if they are going to bother to put it out in the community at all, it is likely to be licensed in some way as to allow most people to use it for free.
Anyhow, that is simply speculation. I don't speak for NCsoft and so far they have been fairly open about donating in general.
I hope and would encourage all companies to freely donate to the jME effort. At this point, all we are implementing in jME (or in any other java engine for that matter) are features commonly found in other C++ engines. Nothing really super-top-secret about that. Still, donations and freely given time have really pushed jME closer to a commercial quality engine - something I feel is impossible to find today when it comes to Java. It would be a help to the industry at large (and in turn to those contributing) if we can continue the generosity for a while yet until we reach at least the 1st or 2nd generation of games built on the engine. At least then we'll all have a solid platform to stand on.
</soapbox>
I whole-heartedly agree renanse. Java gaming is still in its infancy and all of us here are pioneers of a sort. The more we can share with the community the faster and better will be the resulting Java acceptence in the gaming community. We all still get squinted looks when we say we're developing games in Java and its simply because most programmers don't consider Java as a strong language when performance is key. A lot of that used to be more valid than it is now and Java is fully capable of making great games. We need to prove that though. Companies like NCSoft are a great inspiration leading the way to better game development approaches and it's extremely encouraging that they realize the benefits of Java in the area of game development. Consider that they gain more by getting deeper community envolvement in Java gaming than they do by building proprietary solutions and keeping them hidden from the public.
Further, in my own experience I benefit more from providing my knowledge to the community (apart from people correcting the insane code I often pump out) and getting feedback on how to better advance what I've done and add additional features than I would by building my own solutions that only fit my games. That was the purpose of JGN and thanks to it I am continually able to provide better and better networking support in my games as JGN continues to mature.
On a side note, renanse, since I see no opening tag for <soapbox> I'll assume everything you've said in this forum to this point has been enclosed within it? If so, what can we expect from you now?
darkfrog
DF, I thought by now you'd know my comments have an implied <soapbox> tag…
Getting back to the OP's topic… Anyone else working on new and exciting features?
hehe, if that's true then perhaps it should be assumed true of me as well. :-p
Well, as previously mentioned, I have a lot of enhancements to GameStates I'm planning to introduce soon and multithreadedness is on the agenda for the next release as well, right?
darkfrog
MT will be nice, but will definitely be one of those features that will require a bevy of tests be written first to define ground rules of what it needs to accomplish.
Agreed…I know some preliminary work has been done on this, but is anyone currently working on it?
darkfrog
Irrisor and Llama, would love to know what you both have in the pipeline.
Me - im for ever getting closer to releasing an "On all the time" game. Just need to do a few tweaks then will have it out
technical problems on the Forum, but the site is up www.forthestars.com
what ever happend to the bsp renderer it sounded like you guys were really close to finishing that or was I imagining that.
What good is a web site without screenshots? :-p
darkfrog
I understand this is not a wish list, but maybe someone could have a look at JMEDesktop and especially focus and drag and drop? I think there is some handling missing which you have in Swing and it confuses people (like me) seeing some things work and some others not.
Here are some findings but I'm stuck now: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=3205.0
what good is a frog without a tasty princess
I don’t know about “tasty”, but the princess exists, she’s too good to hang around these places. :-p
However, she has posted once:
http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=3317.msg25649#msg25649
But that was to defend a logo she designed. :-p
darkfrog