Hi everybody,
I am Shane, a 16 year old with big expectations of myself! I currently run two websites and will be starting college in a couple of months so will not be able to give my full devotion to this engine but I would like to help. You don't want my life story but basically I started with the Open University at the age of 12 (minimum age was meant to be 18, so I think of it as one of my biggest achievments so far) and have studied Java. I decided to start learning Java because I used to (and still do sometimes) play Runescape and there are many things related to it that I was able to use Java in. What I liked about that was the comunity of the programmers that worked together.
So now I want to work on something more useful and that will really extend my abilities! I am reading tutorials etc. so hopefully will soon be able to help work on this project with you. From what I have read I believe it is possible to help work on the engine rather than just make a game?
I am not interested in making a game, I want to help improve the engine and therefore improve others games.
Thanks,
Shane
Welcome to the community Shane, and thank you very much for your immediate will to contribute!
Shane said:You heard right. So do you have any area of expertise / special interest, or do you think you'd be capable and willing to commit to pretty much any discipline pertaining to engine development, given some time of course.
From what I have read I believe it is possible to help work on the engine rather than just make a game?
I am not interested in making a game, I want to help improve the engine and therefore improve others games.
I do not have any expertise as such, more of a general basis… I have always had trouble choosing between the "disciplines". I am a very quick learner though!
Join the club, I'm an animator/advertising dude that dabbles in programming, just cant keep my hands off anything 3d…
Hah I think 3D is my "weakest link" the best I have managed to do is animate what was supposed to be a yellow submerine by following a tutorial… looked like a lemon!
Welcome, Shane. 
It is great to hear that you want to contribute to the best general purpose game-engine on the planet.
It just occurred to me that one way of helping out would be to update the wiki whenever you can. It might seem like doc-editing should be restricted to only experienced members, but I will beg to differ.
Way I see it, you will be trawling through as much of the documentation as you can bear as you learn the ins and outs of the engine. I would think that after following the steps of a tutorial or having read through a chapter, you will be in the perfect position to make edits to what you’ve just used, because you will have all the lessons learned fresh in your mind, while also remembering all those annoying roadblocks along the way that you could have easily bypassed with a few additions to the documentation.
A similar principle can be applied to useful practices that have been poorly or not at all documented yet. You’ll search around the forum for it, you’ll find pre-existing answers to it or discuss it hands on, then you will overcome the problem, now able to fill in the blanks for any other newcomer following in your footsteps.
The basic process would simply be that when you’ve finished off a tutorial or a collection of related docs and feel like you’ve mastered what they attempt to teach, you can start a thread suggesting some changes and even page additions, much like the way the committers around here propose their commits in new threads.
I don’t mean to sound like this work is being forced on you; I’m basically using this post as a personal brainstorming for possible venues towards improved documentation standards, so don’t read too much into some proposals that might seem far-fetched. I’ll be moving this into a private iterative process from here on 
That sounds like an excellent idea!! I shall try my best to gather everybodies problems and solutions into the wiki.
A good start to 3d is also modelling, even if you want to code I believe that doing a bit of 3d modeling and animation would improve your perception on how triangles are used and calculated in 3d.
Getting closely affiliated with a tool like Blender is also most certainly in everyone's interest if you could get to know it so well that you could make tools for it, like blaine's HottBJ Exporter.
Hmm I have used Blender before but to limited success… I suppose this gives me a reason to master it!!!
Is there anywhere to get 3d objects from for those of us that are no good at making them? Like a creative commons type thing?
If you just search around the Blender channels (forums, news resources etc.) you’ll find some cool free stuff from time to time (like this), as well as some simply excellent tutorials completely for free (like this awesome thing[/url].
Have fun with blender, but don’t forget all about jME ;D
I would like to help in the Engine, maybe in improving image quality and compression, or other things, does the engine support targa compressed images? for instance