Yes, the game coder should decide whether some scene is āindoorā or āoutdoorā and which part of the scene is a ācellā or a āportalā for some techniques. But are they offered to the programmer? Most certainly not, so additional coding is necessary (also by beginners who will quickly be overextended by things like these). Maybe I will try to code things like these and make this very basic part of a game engine public as soon as I can. You should offer several scene managers, Ogre3D does it, and they are right to do it.
Octrees should at least be standard, or grid-based scene managers, maybe with spheres instead of boxes, for better speed.
They would work very similar to the raw scene graph that beginners would use, and do fancy stuff backstage, thus be transparent to the coder.
Maybe they could switch the ācullhintā flag for parent Nodes automatically.
It is not only the polygon count, but also the number of cpu-based culling tests of the scene graph against the frustum. Imagine a vast outdoor or indoor scene with thousands of objects.
Still the polygon count does matter, because jME uses forward rendering and even transparent faces might be included and a user could have an old or weak computer like mobile devices or third world computing systems. And optimizations are always good, even if not really needed on beefy machines.
Itās not the only thing thatās been missing, also a clever LOD system, input configuration (game action mappings, joystick calibration, joystick interface is very poor in particular), an ingame console, sound management, out of the box soft particles, fur shaders, lighting management, ingame cube map generation, system diagnostics and auto-configuration, stringless ID mappings, a demo for entity-systems with jME, a better concept for multithreading, water shaders are flawed, some test demos crash always, files are missing in the SDK, an asset store, a framework for version update, articles on modding, articles on marketing (steam integration etc.), examples for server applications and other things.
I guess there will be a lot of work to be done until jME is a really good engine that needs only few individual additions by the coder.
Whenever I come to engine-coding (I would rather code games instead of engines), I will try to help.
What I cannot do, is coding the web presence, the forum in particular.
If you want to look professional and be taken serious, you should improve this first.
Even as Iām typing this text, my cursor is sometimes stuck in this textbox, Iām using the IE on a fresh windows 7 system.
Please consider using a different forum software, even if this means having a different lookānāfeel.