I don’t know enough about Unity to know whether JMonkeyEngine has anything to offer their diaspora.
JME definitely has weaknesses, which I won’t mention here. I believe its greatest strengths are:
Helpful user community (including this Forum)
Easy access to the source code
I also notice this Forum site had a run of new contributors starting on 18 September. Not a huge number, but more than usual. Perhaps that was a consequence of the drama at Unity, which began with a public announcement on 12 September.
IMO, I would like to add a third great strength. Control, you have more control via code of what is running in your game (physics, networking, etc) and when.
I completely agree with your view. Although jMonkeyEngine emphasizes code-first, even open-source engines like Godot provide friendly editors while still being code-first. These two are not mutually exclusive.
No they are not. Writing a good editor from ground up just takes precious time away from the actual project people are here for.
With that in mind, a big kudos for the sdk devs. They habe spend uncountable hours, and without them the sdk might have gone obsolete 10 years ago.
Godot is a lot of things, but being code first isn’t one of them. At least with gdscript, you’ll be relying on their editor a lot. Can’t comment on csharp or gdnative, as I’m only now exploring those options.
In the end it’s just like @zzuegg wrote, it’s simply a matter of amount of people working on it. In that regard I think it also helps that godot editor (the whole UI) is made with godot, so it’s a lot more approachable for anyone using the engine, unlike jME sdk, where one has to learn Netbeans first.
What I mean is, engines like Godot have fully open-sourced their code, so programmers who prefer code-first can totally skip its editor and develop projects from the source code of the engine directly. But at the same time, it provides friendly editors for most people to quickly design games. That is to say, whether you want to use Godot in a code-first approach or design-first approach, both are allowed. In other words, if JME3 wants to attract more users, I think the advantage of code-first alone can hardly attract a large number of users like those of Unity3D, Godot, etc.
We need to look through developer eyes, what they need? simple. They want to make a game, and with that game, make money! that is.
Surely hobbyists play with unity too. but unity is a serious engine for serious users who want to make a game and make money.
But JME doesn’t satisfy those commercial goals. this does not 100% related only to lack of a good editor.
since we talked about editor, it’s not only a jme problem, many other opensource projects has the problem too, what if there would be a general editor for game level design and a standard conventions so opensource projects like JME all could use benefits of it. maybe we can’t make a editor but maybe we could let JME accept scenes and terrains made in other softwares out there!
like for ex: https://www.world-creator.com/
i think our best approach is to make JME accept thing made with other software in vast flavors
Well, thats true. Thats main lack here really. I would use SDK editor(best if just external possible one tho).
But when i need extend editor for additional feature/etc, then there is a problem so i needed create own one. I would be happy if i could just extend working editor not even need SDK to run and just use it standalone with extendable custom features (like ECS editing/etc). I could probably extend it within Netbeans, but its not the way it should be.
Editor is there, but imo there is lack of possibility of very easy extend of its functionalities and possibility to run out of SDK too.
Anyway personally i do not care since i got one working for me, but looking from some people perspective, this is something missing here.
We need showcase market for users to sell their assets and codes with less cut down 15% to 20% used to maintain the market website and payment for core developers
Also we need beginner tutorial in the official youtube channel
I’m one of those idiots who was using unity for my first project. I don’t like godot, also I’m actively studying java. I hope there will be more sources of how to learn this engine.
There is also JME book, but it might be just a little outdated now.
Also you can check JME Tests project to see some functionalities.
JME have SDK, that have good tools(tho scene editor might take some work), but JME is mainly code-based not click-based so you can even skip SDK and use any IDE if you want like Intellij/etc.
if you already used different Engines, you probably know ECS is a good way to go, here there is Zay-ES.
This HUB forum is a big knowledge data, there is also Discord, but most people look at HUB so here is good source of answers.
There are many github projects and libs, tho they are not centralized. Most important ones are on “Store(Library)”, but a lot of cool ones are not even there, just on Github, so its sometimes worth look there too.
Example: For physics i suggest use Minie lib, while for GUI Lemur, while for ECS Zay-ES.
A lot of freedom here to decide what to use really(you can use C libs too, LWJGL itself is wrapper too, so not limited to Java/Kotlin/etc - you can mix non-jvm languages). This freedom have some advantages and disadvantages ofc.