What are people using successfully?

Troubleshooting General Help
1

Hi,



I've been lurking in the forum for a while now, and I see a lot of questions/problems with model importing, bones, animation, and so on. It would be easy to believe that there are problems for the engine in this area, judging only by the posts. I'd like to turn that around and ask, what are people using successfully in these areas? I'd like to hear about which tools DO work most of the time. You can throw in texture, terrain, foliage, or whatever other special tools you might be using as well - just anything that works and helps you in using the engine.



Thanks in advance,

Stan

2

In my game:

  • Basic stuff like nodes, textures (loaded and generated), controllers etc. is normally very reliable
  • Collision detection with bounding volumes
  • Particles work fine
  • GeometryBatch
  • StandardGame
3

Variable frame rate game with gamestates works here, got the new audio system playing sound tracks and I'm really liking the GameController stuff



Then the normal thinks like nodes, lights textures.



I'm playing around with networking code atm, so the rendering tech isn't my main focus yet, but what I've seen 'just works' as long as you use it in the intended way. (like don't use the audio system from more than 1 thread at a time, oops :P)



Endolf

4
Endolf said:

Variable frame rate game with gamestates works here, got the new audio system playing sound tracks and I'm really liking the GameController stuff


You mean someone has finally found the GameController system?  :P
5

Hi All,



Thanks for the replies so far, but I didn't really mean features inside jME, rather tools outside. For example, the only posts I see are when someone isn't able to get something working, like say 'importing from Blender'. All I see are the problems - does 'importng from Blender' work almost all of the time, or almost none? Note that I'm not asking about Blender :slight_smile: I want to know what tool chains are actually being used by people who are producing the cool things I've seen jME do. If the golden path is Max->collada->jME, or Blender->obj->jMe - those are the kinds of things I'm after.



Stan

6

Typically, you're only going to see problems in the forums (rarely do people post "I just used x and it worked").



Here at work we use the COLLADA Importer exclusively and are doing fairly advanced modeling and animation. Our path is:



3DSMax -> Custom Exporter -> COLLADA -> ColladaImporter -> binary -> game.



We do use a Custom Exporter, but it follows the standards set by the collada spec, Feeling Software's exporter should work in most cases.



The problems you are going to run into is the openess of COLLADA allows for many different ways to express the same thing (bad imo) and the importer is only written to support what we need. There's not enough time, nor is NCsoft going to approve of me going to trying to add support for things that we don't need to make our game. However, typically, the exporters out there provide enough options that you can change how things are done (baking animation matrices for instance) to try to get it to work with the importer.

7

The 3 models I currently have were created in 3ds, but I don't have it, so they were converted to AC3D, which means I can reorient things etc. I have an ac3d loader I wrote a long time ago that imports them. I only know of one feature in AC3D that I use that is not dealt with in the loader, but I have bigger issue with my code than wether or I smoothed normals on surfaces work :slight_smile:



Endolf

8
darkfrog said:

You mean someone has finally found the GameController system?  :P


Yup :), you better have got it working with jinput devices, I suspect people will be worried if I don't use it :)

Endolf
9

Of course it does. :)  The whole "everything is an axis" was my inspiration after all. :wink:

10

:stuck_out_tongue:

11

rarely do people post "I just used x and it worked"

@mojomonk: That's what I was trying to say, apparently I just didn't make it clear.

Thanks for the info on your process. I'm hoping other will chime in with theirs. One day, I'll get enough time to get a dev environment set up on the computer with the better 3d graphics, and try some things myself :).

Stan
12

I'm using MD5 models using keyframed animations and have zero problems. I'm using kman's md5 loader and blenders md5 exporter.

13

Hello,

reading this thread, I still wonder which is the best format for jME.

COLLADA support seems to be the most actively developed here, so I would go with it… but reading some other threads (http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=2982.0) Cal3D and MD5 seems to be pretty well supported too.



@mojomonk

Could you please tell us more about the specificities that ColladaImporter does not support ?





I'm just discovering blender (and can't believe I have been using commercial apps before - namely 3DS and C4D) and would like to use it as close as possible to the engine. So the more data passes through the import / export pipeline, the happier I am :slight_smile:

14

for me, terrain rendering & keyframe animation & collisions work perfectly.

the md2 loader was buggy, had to fix it.

15

I would like to export multiple UV coords and this feature is not supported by the illusoft COLLADA exporter in blender

What about your md2 exporter ?

Thanks :slight_smile:

16

What also causes problems is the different interpretation of file formats between the modeling tool exporters and JME importers. This was especially bad for me when using 3ds max, as most of it's exporters seem to be written be a single person. When I used Blender to export I encountered no problems at all.

17
keeskist said:
When I used Blender to export I encountered no problems at all

are you exporting .3DS files with blender ?