I know this may be a dumb question to you expert users, but where is the documentation for 3.1? I keep running into dead links that try to take me to a wiki page that does not exist. I have literally gone in circles over 100 times trying to find the where to start with jmonkeyengine 3.1.
There is no separate Doc for 3.1. You should start from wiki
Some methods which are deprecated are mentioned in wiki.
So you are safe to go with those tutorials on JME 3.1.
If you get in to trouble following tutorials , please ask.
Thanks!
Oh, now that I think about it, I do have a few quick questions. What is the difference between the SDK and the engine? I’m guessing the SDK comes with some tools or something and the engine is just… the engine, but can you elaborate on what tools? Also, how do I build 3.1? There are three github sources I can see, the master branch, the 3.1 branch, and the 3.1-beta1_xbuf-SNAPSHOT. What is the difference between these? I see a lot of people talking about using the master branch, but it does not make sense to me to use a potentially unstable branch for development. Do you know why they do this? Sorry for all the questions. Clearly, I am still a newbie, but I am very eager to get started (and maybe even help contribute eventually).
Sdk contains the scenecomposer, model converter, shader nodes, material editor, model preview and other useful tools. The engine is exactly that. The engine. Using only the engine is useful if you want to develop in a diffrent IDE (sdk is based on netbeans).
Well, go to youtube and search for “jmonkey SDK” or something, there are nice tutorials about it.
As a beginner, I’d strongly recommend the SDK (Hint: I’m the SDK maintainer, so I have to advertise a bit 
)
Essentially it is Netbeans so you have a full blown IDE which automatically comes bundled with the JME Version (3.1-beta1 in that case) and has tools like model importers (That’s important, so you can generate .j3o Files), Scene Builders, Support to deploy your application to windows (.exe), …, iOS and probably much more.
Think of what Unity is. The Engine itself is only the library.
You have a master branch and a 3.1 branch. 3.1 used to be master but since we are shortly before releasing a stable 3.1 we’ve switched master to be 3.2.
3.1-beta1-xbuf-SNAPSHOT is a/the latest SDK release, which I only pushed because it supports xbuf, a new way of importing models. It’s not really unstable, because if you encounter a problem, it’d be fixed in seconds, where it won’t be fixed when using stable 3.0
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Thank you all for the very speedy responses. I really appreciate it. Well, I am off to get started now. I’ll write a new post if I have any more questions, but I think you all have given me all the information I need for now. Thanks again!
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