jMonkeyEngine.org

jMonkeyEngine Progress Brief

jMonkeyEngine’s 2nd ‘quarter brief’ is well over due. Why so late? Honestly, I counted 4 months for each ‘quarter’ of the 12 month period that is a year. You should all be thankful I’m not contributing any code to this project.

jME3 Core

On the 17th of May 2010, jME3 had its first ever alpha release, complete as an SDK thanks to the jMonkeyPlatform. Since then, while working towards alpha-2, many major features have made it in.

· New Input System

· SSAO

· PSSM

· Picking / Collision fixed

· Many Physics improvements, esp. Vehicle

· Physics load/save

· Many small bug fixes and added methods

With all this cool stuff in, the time has probably come for a new jME3 Showcase Video.

Libraries

Some libraries key to jME3 have also made great progress.

· Nifty GUI 1.2

(Those of you missing some more Nifty documentation should be happy to know there are now several new and updated tutorials available on the Nifty wiki)

· LWJGL 2.5

jMonkeyPlatform

The jMPThe jMonkeyPlatform, a full-fledged IDE with plugins for editing jME3 content and assets. Integral part of the jME3 SDK. project has been picking up a lot of momentum, and we’re terribly excited to see the first of hopefully many plugin contributors.

· Way faster jMPThe jMonkeyPlatform, a full-fledged IDE with plugins for editing jME3 content and assets. Integral part of the jME3 SDK. due to fixed logging bug

· Material (j3m) editing in jMPThe jMonkeyPlatform, a full-fledged IDE with plugins for editing jME3 content and assets. Integral part of the jME3 SDK.

· Improved SceneComposerA plugin in the jMonkeyEngine3 SDK, allows editing the content of j3o files which represent a complete scene or model.

· Linking of models into scenes

· Texture editing tool

· Physics support in SceneExplorer

· Collada Loader Plugin (does not import animations in its current state)

Normen has also been vigilant at making more tutorial videos. Check out the complete playlist.

Documentation (jME3)

jME3 beginner tutorials steps 1-12, first drafts completed (with the exception of Audio)
API Feature Mapping
Rolling Tracks [jME3 Game] Tutorial
Choosing between jME2 and jME3

Website

Starting with the website overhaul proposition back in May, we’ve been working our way through several roadblocks, milestones and iterations ever since. The newjmonkeyengine.org website can be considered ‘open beta’, and we hope to be moving all community activities over there very soon. A whole lot more to come on this topic any day now.

Fun Statistics

We made it past couple nice round numbers on the forum:
· 100’000 Posts

· 14’000 Topics (aaany second now)

· 6000 Members

Our very successful Google Group used for internal discussions actually celebrated it’s 1st anniversary this August.
· In the four months since the last progress brief we’ve more than doubled the post-count in our mailing list, now with 1200 posts in the archive.

· … That averages to 5 messages sent every day. With quite a few more dedicated contributors added to the list recently, we only expect these numbers to improve.

Last fun (not really) non-statistic: The new Joomla-powered front-end screwed up our Google Analytics so we haven’t been able to properly track site statistics since. Bad call, sorry about that…
This will be remedied by the website overhaul.

Projects we’re excited about!

jMonkeyEngine 3

- RollMadness
- Combinable Logic Framework
- SpiderMonkey
- Open Game Finder

jMonkeyEngine 2

- Urban Galaxy – Space MMO
- Windup – Online Baseball Game
- NaooaK Interactive’s sidescroller
- 42below – Vodka Commercial

Contributor Shoutouts

· Jens “void” – For making the ever awesome Nifty GUI and supporting it through our forum and his own.

· Pierluigi “pgi” – For starting a whole range of intriguing projects, among them a Collada importer, the first “playable” jME3 game and a unique “combinable logic framework”.

· Rémy “nehon” – For implementing SSAO and PSSM for jME3. Looks amazing!