Wanting to make a light game

Troubleshooting General Help
1

Well, I want to make a very light 3d java game. Now by light, I mean probably 500mhz processor light is what I would love to see happen, but I'm not sure if JME can run on that kind of machine even if I have a low poly count.



Questions:

  1. What's usually the min. req. for JME? (Processor, ram, vid card)
  2. Can I lower those req. by not drawing a lot of polys or doing any special effects like bloom?
  3. How would I go about limiting the max polys drawn? If there isn't a way I was thinking about drawing  a plain black wall or something around the visible area because I read JME has culling off (I think) so it won't draw polys that aren't visible to the camera - would  this way be best if there's no built in way?
  4. Is there an easy way to get JME to run as an applet? I don't want to use webstart.
2
  1. I don't think there are absolute minimum requirements, and I have heard people talk about running it in crappy computers many times… You should check the Demos on your target computer to see if and which they work.


  2. Obviously no shaders will run in that computer! nor Render to texture or another effect. Aside from that it should be fine.


  3. jME has culling built in. You should stick to triangles, simple lighting and textures… that's it.


  4. Yes… check the wiki.
3

It all depends on how you build your game. Since jME uses OGL that means the target machine will need to have some video card that supports hardware accelerated 3D graphics. I had jME run on a TNT2 without much issue (latest drivers) so you shouldn't have issues either.


3. How would I go about limiting the max polys drawn?

You can't limit the number of triangles drawn, you can however use LOD so that models that are far away get drawn with less triangles. Generally the idea is to use low-poly models so that you never reach a high count.