Question about "town.zip" and maps in general

I’ve gone though all the tutorials and thus far have had great success with jME. However, when it comes to “maps” I’m completely in the dark. In one of the tutorials, collision I believe, there is a zip file called “town” which seems to be a basic implementation of a map. How was “town” created? Are there some articles out there explaining how to create something like “town.zip”?



I know that jME has something called TerraMonkey which can be used to make terrain but I’m not sure where to find the files or some basic getting started with TerraMonkey tutorial. I’m also wondering if it’s more geared toward large roaming landscapes? I’m working on a 3rd person shooter type game so the maps would be considerably smaller than that of an RPG. Is TerraMonkey the way to go for something like that or am I better off building a scene in blender?



As you can tell, I’m totally in the dark here so any tutorials, links, or just general advice would be greatly appreciated.

Its just a mesh with a texture like any model. TerraMonkey is heightmap-based which is more efficient for “natural” terrain. A complete game would probably combine both.

By default the jME3 AssetManager will use the classpath to find resources, however you can link other “file systems” to it so it will look there as well. In the HelloCollision demo the town.zip file is used as another file system from which the scene data is loaded.

Thanks guys, question though:



Where can I find the TerraMonkey code, examples, and possibly some tutorials?

The code for the TerraMonkey might be somewhere you installed jME and tutorials can be found here: https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/legacy/doku.php/jme3