Hey monkeys,
we plan to release for quite a time now and while all planned engine changes and existing engine problems have been addressed theres still a few things holding up the release. These are mainly:
The build server and web server connection (me, @sbook)
Currently the build server is running again but the cross-platform build for bullet still isn’t working properly. Furthermore the build results are not placed on the web server so the update center is not current.
The NetBeans installer is broken on MacOSX 10.8+ (me)
See this bug report: http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=231952 Maybe we can find a workaround by modifying the executable script of the installer for OSX. Until now it worked because the installer would use apples JDK and then install its own JDK as a normal installer item to run the SDK with it. The “normal” way of including a JDK with the installer doesn’t work on OSX for some reason (as per the bug report)
The release video (me)
While it might seem like thats not so important we definitely need material that we can show off while the release momentum is still there. By now I at least have music that we own (so that the video is completely our intellectual property) and some footage and started cutting the video.
The release webpage (@erlend_sh)
While mostly done, some things need to be improved still.
We don’t have current versions of the JDK as “bundles” (me, community?)
As we will bundle the JDK with the SDK from now on we need to create “bundles” of the various JDKs and we didn’t get much help with that apart from one win64 version, see this thread: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/bundle-jdk-with-sdk-opinions-and-help-please/ While its not much of a problem having a JDK with a few security holes (the JDK isn’t installed system-wide) it would be nice to have current JDKs and people who build the bundles. For creating the bundles theres scripts in svn now but its still a lot of work going across 5 different systems to collect them (win32/64 linux32/64 and mac). The version we have bundles for now is 1.7_u14
Documentation (me, others)
Some new features of the SDK and engine have no documentation whatsoever yet.
Test and include Blender 2.68 (me)
Its coming out soon and it would be a shame to have people asking for it from the start if its compatible but not included.
Preparing a svn branch and build for the “stable” releases up to 3.1, so 3.0.1 etc. (me)
This can only be done when we are sure theres no more changes to the sdk and engine before release.
Preparing other distribution channels like OSGI, maven and possibly Ubuntu packages (me)
This requires some research but we can only start this from release on as that is when we’ll start to have “proper” versioning going on. Atm we work with a preliminary 3.0.0 version all the time.
So, hope that gives you an overview on why you still have to wait for a release.
Things that are postponed to 3.1 include, among others:
Moving to gradle as a build system, using git for versioning, moving to native bullet, completely move to shader nodes for the built-in shaders, moving to JOGL as a renderer backend.
If I missed anything please let me know (@coredevs).
It’s a bundle of next-gen plugins for making JME game, and hook right in current JMP. May be few changes in the core were made but not so critical (commit will come later), so technically everything should work smoothly. And in my POV, the direction to move completely to ShaderNode is very attractive, let see how it work out at last.
Hm… I fear an Ubuntu package would be a wasted effort, because
JME’s release cycle would be forcefully tied to Ubuntu’s, JME’s development cycle is currently more “it’s ready when it’s ready” (with good reasons)
unless the PPA has a dedicated security team, there’s the risk of a catastrophic PR backlash if the PPA server is ever hacked
local install works just fine, and it doesn’t even depend on the system’s JDK if it comes with its own
For Maven, I think uploading the engine to Maven Central would be doable and serve almost all of Maven demand. Just make sure to upload the natives as resources in a Java project, alternatives might be desirable but probably won’t fly. (Maven isn’t built for importing and compiling native libraries from souce; it’s possible but requires extra hoops. Better leave that for later releases when the basic process is well-understood, and THEN decide whether it’s even worth doing.)
I don’t see a use case for uploading the entire SDK to Maven Central. Sure it would help those who want to import that codebase as a library and integrate it into their own project, but I haven’t seen anybody trying that, people seem to do plugins instead. Of course there’s also the possibility that some SDK devs find that they’re more possessive about their codebase than they thought and feel uneasy about making this kind of reuse easier.
Blender 2.68 just got released. (Release date: July 28th)
I’ll be doing the gamepad documentation as well as tutorials and the development itself, since I’m already familiar with the api. If for some reason I don’t do this is because I forgot, I hope I remember to do this when I have free development time.
@zarch said:
Is there a list anywhere of the missing docs? I can probably help out on that a bit.
Hm, lets see… The AppState running isn’t documented, neither are the font creator and the nifty preview. Custom controls and the atlas creation should also get a mention, maybe an over-arching page on the right-click options in the SceneExplorer would be good. If you add any new pages to the wiki, their names (like sdk:appstates) need to be added to the sdk documentation index so the build script can grab them for the F1 manual. Generally I guess there should be a page about the plugins and how they work (esp. library addons). Hmm, anything else? I didn’t update the SDK docs for quite a while…
Ok, I can definitely do font creator since I poked the code for that recently. I don’t use most of those other features so may not be the best person but I’ll take a look at some of them as well and let you know what I’ve done.
What are you looking for here? An explanation of what plugins there are? A generic “how to use plugin of type X”? (i.e. add a library plugin then add the library to your project…add an ask plugin and then you can use the new tool). Is there really enough here to build a full wiki page?
– right click scene explorer
Aren’t most of these options pretty self-explanatory?
What are you looking for here? An explanation of what plugins there are? A generic “how to use plugin of type X”? (i.e. add a library plugin then add the library to your project…add an ask plugin and then you can use the new tool). Is there really enough here to build a full wiki page?
– right click scene explorer
Aren’t most of these options pretty self-explanatory?
Yeah, basically a reiteration on how libraries work andsome hints that the content will be updated when the plugin is updated. For the right-click options that might be for most things but idk if its obvious to everybody what “generating tangents” means for example. Just so theres a page about what you can do in the scene using the SDK.
