Probably suggested already

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

Hi David

Bintray does sound interesting. It would be good to shuffle together some kind of feature wishlist to see what kind of things we would actually like to have.

My wishes:

1. Nice modern UI for browsing, contributing and rating assets.

2. Rest API for downloading assets directly to end user game clients.

3. Rest API for contributing assets directly from editor applications and games supporting in app editing / sculpting.

4. Possibility to have multiple repositories synchronized so there could be some redundancy and mechanism for supporting increasing load levels.

5. Some kind of community pruning system to keep the content in good shape.

Br,
Tommi

[pspeed]

…would be nice if there were the ability to have paid assets also. One thing we really miss in JME is JME-game-ready pro assets. Even assets I buy take a ton of work to get into JME.

The team was talking about having an asset “store” sometime back but I don’t remember how far it got.

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

Hi Pseed

Do you know if there was any discussion which ecommerce platform to use to handle the money transactions? I wonder if there is any suitable cloud services for selling digital assets where sellers could setup their wares and just link to JME3 central asset service to be in the same channel with the creative commons / public domain content.

Setting up JME3 specific web shop could be worthwhile if there is enough customers but that kind of thing is not really community operation as it requires bookkeeping and paying taxes. The fore mentioned approach could be a stepping stone to this direction though…

---

David: I think SDK asset pack is good system but might not be perfect tool for accelerating community asset production and sharing. The community asset repository content could certainly be periodically packaged and distributed in one or more asset packs.

Br,
Tommi

[david_bernard_31]

@Tommi,

Good ideas, but IMHO, we should not use the same infrastructure for assets used at design time (by dev) and at runtime (by player).
IMHO, assets used by player (what you called end user game clients if I understand right), can become heavy load and may require (for non free game) some aditionnal check about end-user authorisation. As it’s acceptable for dev to subscribe to a third party store, it’s an explicit action. It’s not for a player. And may be the game provider (dev, editor) would like to have some control about whish asset are used (eg: I used getdown + an http server to serve data + update (WIP)).

So before create a alternative to steam + steam’ workshop. I though we should work to provide a solution for design time (like Unity’ market), then we could work on a service for runtime (a plus version Unity).

Now my replies :

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: 1) Nice modern UI for browsing, contributing and rating assets.

Bintray provide web UI (modern is mater of taste ), for contributing, rating. But As bintray also provide an REST API, it’s possible to create a nicer wrapper site.

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: 2) Rest API for downloading assets directly to end user game clients.

with bintray it’s possible for public free package (for commercial, need some investigation), but see my opinion above.

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: 3) Rest API for contributing assets directly from editor applications and games supporting in app editing / sculpting.

It’s possible, I paper design some SDK plugin to browse and upload assets to bintray, but it require time. It’s low priority on my todo list because I’m a gradle user and download/upload is “easy” from gradle. I’ll share some gradle task + doc to help the community (WIP)

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: 4) Possibility to have multiple repositories synchronized so there could be some redundancy and mechanism for supporting increasing load levels.

I used bintray as a maven repository, so we/you can cache on local or via your own server (artifactory, nexus), and create CDN if you like. It’s a problem if we have success, and the solution exists but it costs money (infra).

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: 5) Some kind of community pruning system to keep the content in good shape.

If community can prune data, then data can’t be used directly by player (risk to break the game)
Bintray allow to delete package or link by the owner of the repository (have a team to manage is part of the payed version of bintray).

@pspeed said: ...would be nice if there were the ability to have paid assets also. One thing we really miss in JME is JME-game-ready pro assets. Even assets I buy take a ton of work to get into JME.

+1, I quickly talk about this with Normen. If we want to provide a store with paid assets require :

1. a way to pay for customer

2. a way to send money to provider

3. a way to restrict (DRM like) paid assets

4. and 2. may require some legal “shop” agreement + some work with payement system (paypal, …) + some dev to provide all the web UI…

5. requires some technical works, investigations,…

I saw this as a business opportunities, but I’ve got some questions about the market’size and ROI (otherwise I am already in the process of working on it )

The team was talking about having an asset “store” sometime back but I don’t remember how far it got.

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

Hi Pseed

Do you know if there was any discussion which ecommerce platform to use to handle the money transactions? I wonder if there is any suitable cloud services for selling digital assets where sellers could setup their wares and just link to JME3 central asset service to be in the same channel with the creative commons / public domain content.

Setting up JME3 specific web shop could be worthwhile if there is enough customers but that kind of thing is not really community operation as it requires bookkeeping and paying taxes. The fore mentioned approach could be a stepping stone to this direction though…

---

David: I think SDK asset pack is good system but might not be perfect tool for accelerating community asset production and sharing. The community asset repository content could certainly be periodically packaged and distributed in one or more asset packs.

Br,
Tommi

[avpeacock]

@pspeed said: ...would be nice if there were the ability to have paid assets also. One thing we really miss in JME is JME-game-ready pro assets. Even assets I buy take a ton of work to get into JME.

The team was talking about having an asset “store” sometime back but I don’t remember how far it got.

We could always start with a free repo at first and then expand? I think this would work better as it’d encourage a good amount of free models for anyone coming to JMonkey, and then we could offer a paid market place to top it up and have better quality models? I’m easy though. I get that free stuff doesn’t always last as long, so a bit of both could work better and a portion of the money made could be invested back into JMonkey. What do you personally feel would be better for the community?

I’ll be honest, I see this less as a business opportunity and more as a way of benefitting/investing in the community(hence donating a portion of the profits straight to JMonkey). The dev team do a shit ton of work for free, and other people do too(such as Chris) and they give a lot of support for free. Something like this could encourage a lot more developing members =). If there are profits to make, well, great! But i’m keen to share/give them; it wouldn’t be possible to do this without these guys anyway! However I get personal benefit from this, the better JMonkey does, the better I do because my projects built on it :).

Tommy: I don’t know anywhere near enough on modelling to be able to run the competitions and agree with you =). But actually I think you’re right this will have a better chance if hosted by JMonkey =).

I can also deal with creating a paypal payment system as i’ve done this before.

Tommy: would you be interested in helping with a project i’m making at the moment to help people learn about Autism? It would fit in with what you want to do anyway =). Do you have an email I could speak to you on?

Sorry guys will reply to the rest of the messages in a bit. I have a big app release for work due early next week ready for a competition. Glad to see people on board :D!

[david_bernard_31]

I did some quick investigation. Providing a marketplace/store, have legal implication (term of service, i.p, …) + all payement stuff ( + vat, …) I can share some links, if you whish.

About free version of bintray, there some limitations : like total space per user 500 Mo, limit per file/artifact 50 Mo.
I’ll have to split my 85 Mo archive for crytek sponza (model + texture) is a 85Mo, into several jar and define dependencies, (crappy workaround)

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

Hi Ashley,

I would be happy to help out with the project all though I do have limited time budget to share between projects. My email address is tommi.s.e.laukkanen@gmail.com. Please send over some more details.

Hi David,

I like how bintray looks and it promises free OSS distribution. It is also good idea to build simple rest front end which hooks to multiple bintray repositories through REST. Everybody willing can have their own repository for their own assets and one or more shared ones with central house keeping personnel. The commercial repositories owners would need to pay for the bintray service but that is OK as they would have income. Having maximum single asset size is probably good to keep packages in sensible sizes.

Maven would be good packaging format as you suggested and the jars distributed via MAVEN/BINTRAY would be SDK / asset packs. Was this your idea?

Cheers,
Tommi

[david_bernard_31]

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: I like how bintray looks and it promises free OSS distribution. It is also good idea to build simple rest front end which hooks to multiple bintray repositories through REST. Everybody willing can have their own repository for their own assets and one or more shared ones with central house keeping personnel. The commercial repositories owners would need to pay for the bintray service but that is OK as they would have income. Having maximum single asset size is probably good to keep packages in sensible sizes.

Bintray alreay allow to create a central repository via link.
example 1 :
I “host” on my repository my gradle plugin, but I create a link into a central hub repository,
see http://plugins.gradle.org/ and there submit link
example 2 :
I create jme3stuff repository, and Empire Phoenix create a repository for his own stuff (jme3-javafx), he request me to add link for jme3-javafx into jme3stuff since jme3stuff “display” jme3-javafx. It’s a link any update on the original package is visible through every links.

@tommi.s.e.laukkanen said: Maven would be good packaging format as you suggested and the jars distributed via MAVEN/BINTRAY would be SDK / asset packs. Was this your idea?

Currently I’m experimenting creating regular jar like for .class, but for resources (Models/…, Textures/…) + pom (to define some meta-data: dependencies, licenses, …).
For the SDK part, the jar is like any libraries (it contains assets as resource, and can also contains code for Controls, UserData, Behaviors, similar to Unity Prefab )
To Ease use for SDK user, a GUI plugin can be created (in future) to browse, download (+ convert into assetpack or netbeans library), to upload, as is SDK users will not need to use a webbrowser and to import jar or create library.

The solution should work for SDK user and non-SDK user.
The solution should work with and without SDK plugin.

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

The web UI could also offer method for automatically packaging and uploading single asset if you just want to share a texture? There could be also support for uploading zip files which would be automatically converted to jars as artists might feel jar packaging is inconvenient.

-Tommi

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

David and Ashley,

Should we start testing this idea by putting some of our assets to bintray and interlink the repos?

Something like

  Ashley
/

JME3 - David

Tommi

We can see what kind of things we can achieve with bintray standard functions and user interfaces…

-Tommi

[zzuegg]

Just want to throw in my opinions.

Asset store, good idea.
Paid assets. Sure!
DRM, dealbreaker!! Why? If i buy an asset, i would like to use it as long i want. I don’t think any serious gamedev should use some assets with the risk in mind that a third party can shotdown its server and your game too.

What about just using one of the current etablised asset selling site? I am not sure i see the point of having an own personalized (jme) assetstore where you have to provide the whole infrastructure.
Keeping a updated/searchable/sorted directory of links to “jme ready” assets should be enough from my point of view. If possible jme could cooperate with one of those asset sites.

Beside that the combination “jme ready assets” suggests that all other assets are hard to import to jme, which is a completely different topic.

[david_bernard_31]

Today, I successfully use my gradle asset pipeline
0. download via http

1. unarchive -> obj + mtl +tga
2. convert tga -> .dds (80 Mo of tga is too big to be upload to bintray)
3. convert obj+mtl+tag/dds -> j3o+dds
4. pack into a jar
5. upload to bintray
6. (manual) upload screenshot and “avatar” for the package.

I have to adjust descriptions, … and to do more tests

but you can see the result at Package crytek_sponza2 - davidb (I’ll use it to share the demo of my deferred renderer)

I create jme3stuff for my jme3 stuff but mainly as a central hub, so I’ll wait your request to link your package.

[david_bernard_31]

@zzueg, Do you have some link of potential asset store ? The only one I know are “specialized” : blender only, unity only, texture only, sound only, …

Don’t forgot that assets services for a game-engine (IMHO) should provide : modeles, sounds,… materials, code ready for usage like with the unity assets’store.

[zzuegg]

I would name turbosquid as first… would have to google around a bit to find a few more.

Agree, did not have code in mind. Probably because beside i am not sure what code i would like to buy and then integrate it in my code… going to browse the unity store a bit to get an idea

[zzuegg]

Btw, like the bintray/gradle idea. If SDK integration is required writing a plugin to add lines to the gradle file should be possible imho

[tommi_s_e_laukkanen]

Hi

I would love to see assets already fully prepared for JME3. Things you can directly load with asset manager like characters, furniture, textures, sounds…

Turbosquid is great but most of those assets require some editing, optimizations before you can actually use them.

Probably we need both categories possibly in different repositories or with different tags…

-Tommi

[jayfella]

Just to let you guys know, we are writing an asset store Api. At this moment in time it will rely on git as storage, so only open source things will be added. Paid assets will not be an option. As the Api matures we may possibly venture into that. There are a lot of legal as well as practical situations to take into consideration to do that, and we feel it is best to create a working api first, and see how popular it becomes before venturing into that area. Development is underway already, but if I were to give a timeframe, it would be at the very least when the site migrates to its new home. There are a lot of new technologies coming into play on the web side of things right now, so there is a lot to be excited about!