I am planning to make multiplayer game to play from the browser. I must confess I am fairly new to the “engine” world, I always coded my games from scratch.
I played around for one day with the free version of Unity and I was amazed by the simplicity of its editor and how easy it is to integrate your code/scripts into the game. So I decided to give a shot at some engine for my “new little game”.
I searched for alternatives to Unity (my budget is too low and I can’t stand the lack of shadowing…), I found jmonkeyengine and I was quite impressed by what you could achieve with it!
I would like to use jme3 but here are my problems/questions:
Lack of tutorials! It’s impossible to understand where to start!
The few tutorials that are available, for instance the “Hello series”, are programmers-only. I am a programmer but I want to discover the editor’s power otherwise I would just code in XNA.
The editor doesn’t work as expected I am afraid… An example? The “Hello Terrain tutorial”. Why should I code stuff that is readily available from the editor? Although… I can’t get the terrain to work from the editor! I go to my scene, click on edit terrain, place some random terrain in there, save the project and the next time I open the scene the terrain disappeared again! Maybe I am doing something wrong, but what should I do to learn doing things from the editor first, then code on the top of them?
Lack of “basic” things such as: insert cube, insert sphere. Do I really have to create my own shapes in Blender to just put some placeholders? Not a big deal of course, but it would be nice not to have to
Of course I totally understand it’s just an Alpha and the engine IS amazing, I am very happy about this piece of software and I totally support it! I just hope I will solve my issues to make it my choice.
1) Lack of tutorials! It’s impossible to understand where to start!
I don't agree with that at all :) Look in the wiki, I started out from there, did all the beginner tutorials, tested things myself and I am pretty happy right now.
Learning all the time and doing my little projects.
2) The few tutorials that are available, for instance the “Hello series”, are programmers-only. I am a programmer but I want to discover the editor’s power otherwise I would just code in XNA.
I agree on that one on that it would be nice to have some comprehensive tutorials on the JMonkeyPlayform editor.
I myself use eclipse at the moment, with no drag and drop editors. Good for learning IMO.
Well, you are right about (1) if you consider “programming tutorials”. There IS a lack of tutorials: editor tutorials.
It’s good for learning, but I would like to start playing around with the editor before jumping into the coding, simply because I want to use JME mainly for its editor and networking capabilities!
7 videos and a manual for most every function is too few? Well congratulations. If you had really gone through the programming tutorials you would maybe understand what all the functions in jMP are about. I will create tutorial videos for both jME and jMP combined about how to start and typically asked topics at some time but for now, really, you can find your way around. Unity is very restricted in what you can do with it, thats why so much stuff can be done with visual tools. jME is completely open, more like the Unreal SDK, so less chance to make a complete “Little Big Planet Experience”.
Well, I beg you pardon but I couldn’t find these 7 videos you are talking about…
I don’t really want you to see me as a criticizer, just had some perplexities and I am not comparing Unity with this of course otherwise I would be using Unity!
About the videos, maybe they could be linked on the main page in the documentation section perhaps?
I searched on youtube and I searched on the wiki for video tutorials… can you post a link? I am trying to do a couple of searches myself…
Hey! That’s a good point! I was looking at jMonkeyEngine, couldn’t notice the difference between Engine and Platform eehehe, will have a look at that, thanks…
