Is this already used somewhere or should I 'fix' it to trim at the beginning?
It's a new enough (read: bleeding edge) feature, that it's better to get fixed in place now. Especially with 1.0 close.
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Will your fix work with resourceName's that have '' delimiters in it? Your inline comments say you can safely assume it is a URL, but as your own example above shows, that's not always true.
My example above was produced by the old trim method: it was using java.io.File to do the trimming, while File produces platform dependent paths (with backslashes on windows). The values passed to the resource locator must be slash separated to work with new URL(url, path). I'll add a javadoc for it.
Ok, well then that means we need to change all of the model loaders to do a search/replace of '' to '/'.
No, why do you think that? The initial path has slashes, already.
I've seen plenty of model files created by windows machines that have texture paths that look like: c:myArtFoldermyTexturesskin.tga
That's right but in the .jme files even those are url encoded with slashes.
Yes, but the models (the non .jme models) still need to load using the model loader / converters.
The loaders do not use any os-specific seperators (no java.io.File oder fileSeparator used). So this can only happen if the model files contain backslashes in the resource names. This was not working on linux and it does not work on windows now. I'd say that's even better.
you just forced me to spend my time not developing hhexen. thanks. even i need to eat and drink sometimes.
:?
m ygame is texture-free right now because the project name contains a whitespace
Can you provide some details, please, as the jME Tests work fine with spaces now (in filesystem and in jars).
What model files are you loading? (.jme, .md2 etc.)
Did you require the 'old' trimming for some reason? (what paths are contained in your model file? what are the paths on the filesystem like?)
How do you set up the locators?
Do you use the locators in your own code or do you use loaders only?
i didn't set up the locators at all after updating to the nightly build, which was the reason. 
one error found so far:
Caused by: java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in opaque part at index 44: file:visual/landscape/outdoorlife/trees/Baum 2.ms3d