Questions regarding jME and applets

Hello all and thanks for reading.

I’m currently at uni on a games course. I am working as part of a group to create a game for 9/10 year olds that could be accessed by many schools easily over the web. Our clients will host the game on their servers and provide a web address for the game.



The game we are creating will be simple, with a 3D game board the player must travel around and answer questions. There is going to be 3-5 3D models total in the game and lots of 2D assets/GUI. It will be bright, colourful, fun and educational.



The reason we are doing it in Java is, I am the “lead programmer” (as I have the most programming experience, unfortunately none in Java), and in a different class I am learning Java to develop for Android, so learning Java that will benefit two projects will be better than trying to learn two different languages and libraries at the same time.



I have been looking at the documentation and have a few questions about jME and its applet capabilities.

My questions are these:

  • Performance? Is the applet in jME going to give any performance issues on low-end PCs as the game will primarily be run on classroom computers and who knows how good they will be?
  • Installations? Presuming that the classroom computers all have Java on them, would there be any additional installations needed when a computer is first used to play the game? (As students wouldn’t have permission to install anything on the computers being used)



    Thanks in advance for any responses.

a) Applet runs with the same performance as standalone apps.

b) Java is all you need, yeah.

thanks, thought as much, just wanted to double check before i delved into it.

Be warned to check if the gpu’s at your target audiance support opengl2.0! If not you should probably use jme2 instead of 3, as 3 has only very limited old tech support. And I guess for your requirements shader based materials are if at all eyecandy but not needed.