I've been watching jME for a while now, and the 3.0 release has me quite interested.
A bit of background: I'm currently using Unity3D as a prototyping tool for my project. I'm not a huge fan of the C# paradigm although at least it's something I could fairly quickly port into Java, so in the meantime my work is not being wasted if I decide to move over to jME at a later date.
My questions about jME3 are as follows (in order of importance):
How difficult is it going to be for me to bring in bone-animated, skinned meshes from Blender to jME 3.0, such that they work right out of the box?
Can I manipulate bones directly as part of a mesh's bone hierarchy?
How soon, roughly, are we expecting to see a working physics implementation? Closer to 3 months, or closer to 6 months from now?
Is basic (non-physics-based) collision detection implemented in 3.0, and if so how simple is it to use?
Is there any sort of core("supported") networking/multiplayer module planned? (way less important than the above)
I'll post others if I think of any, but these are probably the main questions I have.
First of all, read up on the initial doc page for jME3, watch out for changes and make requests if there are any particular tutorials you'd like to see (no guarantees, but we'll usually prioritize the most wanted docs).
I'll try answer your questions, but bear in mind that I am not deeply involved in the most technical aspects of jME3.
NickZA said: 1. How difficult is it going to be for me to bring in bone-animated, skinned meshes from Blender to jME 3.0, such that they work right out of the box?
The Blender->JME3 pipeline has not been tested extensively yet, but it should work. The "OGRE Meshes Exporter on this page creates the appropriate Ogre model format that jME3 supports. From there you just gotta use the forum and code for what it's worth until we get more solid docs up.
@2: Don't know.
3. How soon, roughly, are we expecting to see a working physics implementation? Closer to 3 months, or closer to 6 months from now?
Very soon. I'll dare say closer to 3 months from now. You do know the preliminary implementation has already begun?
@4: Think so, at least I know it's planned. Don't know about usability.
5. Is there any sort of core("supported") networking/multiplayer module planned? (way less important than the above)
No, not beyond "we should have it at some point...". It is currently not a priority, but if some network-savvy individual decides to bang out a customized networking solution for jME3, the team will definitely support it.
That's all I got. Hopefully one of the developers will swing by and make all my commends redundant soon enough :P
jme3 is still pre-alpha but we are working to bring it to alpha as soon as possible.
About your questions:
Not difficult if you can export to OgreXML from your editing software, the animation system is basically working, but not quite done yet (animation blending etc. is missing)
Yes
Bullet physics is already built in, some changes are still to be expected and vehicles/characters do not work properly yet
Yes, and quite simple, dont know if its fully functional yet (Kirill?)
Thanks guys, this sounds good. I'll probably be waiting on the physics and collision detection to be fully (or usably) functional. But I am glad that the skeletal animation & blender->jME pipeline is there. That's a big pull in the jME direction from my PoV.
I'll probably stick my head back in every few weeks just to see how things are going. Is there any RSS feed or mailing list to know when jME releases are happening?
Yes, for the time being you’re gonna want to subscribe to this feed. We’ll soon be replacing the blog with a more feature-rich Joomla! install, so the feed is set to change, but that’ll be announced in advance.
The collision detection is quite buggy, not sure why. I think we'll just have to rely on jbullet until I can get SimplePhysics ported (which should be easy for the most part). For networking, you can just use JGN which IMO plugs in very nicely into pretty much any engine.
to 5. I'm currently working on a simple server-client network system for jme3 with physics sync
however progress here will be kinda zero untill summer break from university (math is a bitch, but at least I'm now closer to understand quaternions ;))
Then I plan to finish a working basic version.
Of course this is so far nothin offical, and ore for my own project, but when finsihed I will post it in the forum, and then it's up to the Mod's to decide if it will be integrated in the core.
Due to licensing costs etc. with Unity going so far as to prevent me from effectively using source control until I pay $1.7k in licensing fees, the fact that Java intrigues me more than C# does, and the annoyance of how physical object instantiation is done in Unity (it's a long story), I've happily decided to go with jME. It's jME2 for now, but I may port things over to jME3 if the benefits are great, at a later stage.
I've ported a fair section of my C#/Mono prototype code over to jME2 during the last 24 hours, and I must say that it's been quite painless. I've never really used Java except briefly (I'm from a C++ and ActionScript background though, so I have a lot of respect for J), but I have to say that it's been really straightforward so far. The only thing that has truly annoyed me has been the lack of aliases for Java generics, resulting in extreme verbosity in my templatised graph classes… but hey, both languages have their pros and cons. I am glad as hell to be away from the MSDN docs for a change! :wink:
Also I'm thrilled to be working in Eclipse again, as I'm very familar with it (from using FDT).
Thanks again for all your comments and you'll be hearing from me soon enough on these forums. :)
Great to have you aboard! I can understand your wishes to get away from MSDN for a while :) I spent the better part of a year living in Access and C#… Never again
