[Proposal] Making JME more artist friendly

That is if you know how to code ^^

Thatā€™s what Jme is intended to be in my opinion. It is a tool for coders to create 3D games, nothing more, nothing less. It is not a fancy editor with a button ā€œCreate RPGā€ and visual editors and so on. You can just code because you like it and create amazing games without having to worry about the real low level stuff while having awesome tools
(SceneComposer for example: You can attach AppStates, view your models, create ParticleEffects in real time; thereā€™s also a material editor and so on - why do people always complain about the lack of tools??).

The question why Jme would want to grow outside of that ā€œhobbyst and coder nicheā€.

And on that note, Minecraft was built on LWJGL alone, which is as low level as you can get :wink:

Its a bit like on the audio forums: ā€œI need a new synthesizer, I canā€™t do proper stuff with the existing ones!ā€ All the while others make thousands or millions with the stuff thats available :slight_smile:

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yeah, we shall have more visual editors. visual editors are cool and much better than code, look at this:

http://puu.sh/ihf1C/76d905fe77.png

itā€™s so easy to debug and write.
Sure you could do that in few rows of code and you could also optimize it, but i am an Artist and i make game, i have no time to leaRn how the stuff works, itā€™s muCh better to waste it on doing weird puzzle things And complaining at the end because my gameā€™S perforMances are so bad that it looks like a slideshow.

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Seems someone is trolling.

A team made a game with blueprints and itā€™s sold on Steam.
Some people never learned to code and sold small mobile games made with Playmaker in Unity, Playmaker was used in the game DreamFall sequel and creators said the tool helped them a lot.
Playmaker is one of the most popular plugins in Unity for a reason.

Could it not pleases you itā€™s like that people make 3D games using visual scripting only, like people make 2D games with Construct 2 without coding or other 2D tools without coding.
Just face the reality, many people will never be coders or will not want to learn coding, still they will be able to make great games.

Coders are the best, coding is the best way to make a game, high level tools are for stupid people , like Unit or Crysis or Unreal 4 they are for very stupid people, stupid people and teams unable to make great games, or unable to make games better then JME3 :grinning:

Itā€™s always the same when a group of coders feels attacked.

I never found a good JME3 game and i donā€™t like Minecraft also , while there is lot of very good Unity or UDK3 , Crysis games.
This is the resulting game that matters :sunglasses: , not what langage what engine you used, or if you used or not used a visual programming language :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Just answer me a question: What you want to hear from us? We said already many things and you still insist in Unity3D, Crysis or Unreal Engine. I have a feeling that you are wasting you time here, the ā€œgroup of coders that felt attackedā€.

There are actually quite a few larger scale games in JME3 at the making. They simple are not done tho, as this type of games need serveral years, and not everyone feel good in releasing buggy early access crap. (Unity makes that one far to easy)

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It looks like here, there is someone who cares a lot to let everyone knows that you can make a game without being a developer.

Well, donā€™t worry MonkeyGroove, I am pretty sure you will be able to make a good game even though you are not a real developer, there are a lot of games with simple gameplay and a lot of issues that are pretty famous, players donā€™t care of them so much, as long they have fun by playing your game.

And nobody is telling you, that you wonā€™t be able to make your game by using visual editors, but for people who know how to code, try to get what they want by doing a giant twisted ā€œpuzzleā€, is harder than just code it.
Thatā€™s why we use jme.

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You never saw good games in JM3 because must of the good games made in Jm3 are not announced as made in Jm3. There is a lot of good games, but its not easy to figure out witch engine they was made for. Jm3 is the best engine I could found, before I was using Unit, not that Unit is bad, but in Jm3 I have more freedom to do what I want, I just wrote a few days ago some codes in my game that was impossible to do in Unit.
About the feeling some artists have about its hard to make good games, I am developer, and I feel the same, my opinion again, artists and developers should work toguether, if you want to do some game just let us know, I am sure you will find a lot of devs here looking for models, images, musics etc, and even game ideas.

I do agree thought , Jm3 needs some improvements, I think everyone agree.
There is no editor for nifty for example, you need to do everyting by hand, editors for particles is buged, etc. I dont miss any 3d editor, why the engine supouse to suport 3d modeling if you can do it in an 3d modeler software and export ?

Yes, we are the best.
There are people who donā€™t even use ANY engine or library, coding everything from scratch, calling openGL functions directly from their code.

Do you want to hear something funny? Iā€™m developer too and Iā€™m not using JMEā€™s SDK, because I donā€™t like to use such tools. Everything I have is made in the codeā€™s level. Iā€™m not using most of JMEā€™s features, instead of that I did such things on my own. Because I LIKE SO. Because creating a game should give me FUN! And coding gives me a lot of FUN. Thatā€™s the reason why Iā€™ve chosen JME. And probably thatā€™s why other JMEā€™s users have made the same choice.

So, enough talking and trolling, lets make a game :wink:

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I agree that importing animations can be a ball-ache. Unity and the like have a store where you can buy such things which are pre-tested to work as described. That is a major bonus. With JME itā€™s a bit hit n miss unless you actually know what youā€™re doing. Im certainly not an artist - I hate 3D modelling and anybody that likes it is a crazy crazy person.

Having said that, there are a lot of areas that could do with some extra hands - Itā€™s up to the people that use the engine to say ā€œhey - I had a problem doing X and I came up with this solution - is it of any use to you?ā€ - and thus the world continues to rotate.

Iā€™ve written quite a few games using JME but never finished any. Iā€™m probably the 90% of the users right there. But there are, have been, and will be some really nice looking games made using the current engine.

A game called chaos is one Iā€™ve been keeping my eye one lately - as well as some of the really really talented coders like @nehon and @thetoucher and @pspeed for his intimately wierd knowledge of java. Check out this youtube channel. The names I have mentioned are a tiny piece of the talent around here. Ask the right questions and they appear from nowhere blowing your mind.

Given the conversation that followed, I should clarify that I meant ā€œgetting paid full time to work on JME as their day jobā€. Itā€™s the only way to effectively compare Unity/Unreal to JMEā€¦ they have teams of guys working on their toolsā€¦ itā€™s their ā€œday jobā€.

The rest of us have day jobs already and do what we can in our free time, scratching the itches that matter to us in particular. So, yeah, most of those changes are going to be for other developers.

It would take a team of 3-4 people probably six months to crank out a semi-decent initial editor. Thatā€™s not counting getting an asset pipeline working properly. Probably another 6 months of getting the tool to be decent and ready for release.

3-4 people for a year, a pretty standard budget would be $750k. The includes ā€œall of the other stuffā€ necessary to run and manage a company of that size. Youā€™d need more than that ā€œin the bankā€ before any of us would be willing to quit our jobs, I thinkā€¦ because itā€™s not a good business proposition.

Paid game tools are likely to be a shrinking market. The big players dominate simply because they dominate. There is unlikely to be an organic way to grab their market share and weā€™ve already seen them reducing their costs. They can get away with that because they have the volume necessary. Remember they used to charge a lot more for their toolsā€¦easier to grow a team with lots or revenue coming in.

Given the fact that my wife battles brain cancer, etc. JME would have to have banked two years of my time (plus health insurance, benefits, etc.) before I could even remotely consider dropping my day job. Reality is a harsh mistress.

So in the mean time, we will keep improving JME in the ways that we need it improved. All along hoping someone else will have the time to fix the other stuff. Itā€™s how open source works.

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I dont complete agree with you on that. Jm3 has as fundamental to be an free open source tool.
From where the money would come to do anything in an free source project ?
I am pretty sure it could be extended to an paid tool, but it should be an different project as it has different scope. I am not sure if the current licence Jm3 allow anyone here to get it and extend it into an more complete but paid tool.
In fact, for any serous company that wants to have an very powerful engine, they should invest in Jm3 and extend it, since its open source and easy to understand / scale, other engines like Unit simple will not give you that option.

Soā€¦ after all of thisā€¦ can we just get an fbx import or something like that ._.

I promise if i can have an fbx import for chrismas il be a good boy xD

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Open source project doesnā€™t mean free source project !
And quoting a nice presentation (in french : here ) : ā€œThe time of nerd eating pizza and paid by gratefulness is overā€

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Yes, of the hundreds of reasons what I said wonā€™t work (of which I pointed out about 10) this is yet another reason it would be difficult.

But you can have a paid tool that is based on open sourceā€¦ itā€™s just that much harder to earn revenue. But I already discussed how itā€™s basically impossible to break into the market at a decent price anywayā€¦ so it would already have to be free to rock-bottom priced. That fits nicely with open source.

So if you could fix the other 99 problems with a paid JME then this one would be the easy one.

Until you donā€™t believe in something it will never happen.

Blender, these two last years , there is lot of new releases very often,They succeed bringing a shop to buy plugins or 3D models and Blender got lot of attention lately, Epic just gave them lot of money for better FBX support.
And it got put on Steam also.

Why this model could not work with some other open source software ?
I think the biggest challenge is making JME3 as visble and popular as some other little 3D engines.
If you would propose a lot better 3D editor as a plugin o buy or some games modules having all code base , something like Unity plugins (RPG game template or other racing) , i think many people would buy if JME3 was popular enought.

The most difficult part is getting attention from other people.

Go for it. The beauty of open source software is that anyone can contribute.

I definitely look forward to seeing a new editor.

Sorry for offtop, but I noticed a key word ā€˜popularityā€™. There are many lists with game engines, for example here: http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-game-making-tools
Why there is nothing about JME3 there? Such lists are the first thing that are checked by future indie game developers on the very beginning of their journey. Being there should be a first step. Bigger community means bigger chance for finding the contributor.

JME needs someone for PR, not a coder, not an game designer, but someone who is able to speak with writers, redactors, bloggers and with owners of such lists.

EDIT: according to accusations, that JME is only for coders: make it itā€™s main advantage. Yes, it IS FOR DEVELOPERS, real developers who donā€™t looks for ā€˜create a gameā€™ button. But in this case youā€™ll need a spin doctor too :wink:

Iā€™m glad that I spend enough time to find JME. But there was not really much information about it around the internet.

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