jMonkeyEngine.org

About two years ago I made a simple racing game in Java 3D for a school course called Advanced 3D. Although the result looked reasonable, especially as I had only six weeks to make it, it suffered from always consuming 200+ mb of memory and having framerates of 15-20. A few months ago I discovered jMonkeyEngine, and quickly became impressed with its set of features. As I no longer have the time to create an entirely new game I decided to port Ferrari3D to JME. The result is quite impressive, it looks and plays MUCH better and smoother than the original.

The game itself is rather basic though, although all the standard stuff (multiple cameras, AI, track records) is there. Multiplayer is only via LAN through standard sockets, I haven

Well, you could always brake before a corner. This isn't Mario Kart I agree with you that the AI is poor, I

Thanks for sharing your experiences in porting a game across to jME.   It looks nice.  If you can grab some video footage, post it on youtube so I can add it to the jME play list

mpeg4 and avi both work ok… (for best results use 640×480)

Ender said:
Again a poor performance game under Mac OS X (7 FPS, track disapears frequently, probably because of the poor framerate). I guess you use [font=Courier New]swingui[/font].

That surprised me a bit. I have a Mac Mini myself and I get framerates between 25 and 30. Which kind of Mac do you have, and are you using Tiger or Leopard? It's bizarre how low your framerates are, I tested on a 4-year old laptop and the framerate was almost never below 20.

Edit: What could happen is that your resolution is so high that the painting of the HUD takes up an unreasonable amount of time. Could you try running in non-fullscreen mode, so that the HUD is 800×128?

I use a quad in ortho mode to paint the GUI, as described in the tutorial "HUDs for the total n00b", although I do use Java 2D to paint the actual image on the HUD. The menus are in Swing, but they are in a separate window that is destroyed when the game is started.

Also, videos are now at and . Thank MEncoder for the blurryness.

Ok. I tested the openal.dylib sobstituting it with a Universal version taken by MacPorts but this not resolved the problem.

Anyway after playing a little more with it I can make this considerations.

1. At the start the track is always invisible and I have poor framerate.
2. When framerate is poor (about 5-7 FPS), the track is allways invisible and I only see other cars, other objects in the scene and a light-gray background color. I guess the two things are related.
3. Framerate is not allways 5-7 FPS, there are areas of the track where I see the track and I also have about 60-87 FPS.

I guess 2 possible reasons.

1. It could be something that is related to acceleration of the car. Even if it is strange that at the beginning the problem appears even if my car is almost 0 velocity.
2. Or it could be something related to some lighting effect. I notice that there is a Sun flare…

… any other ideas?

keeskist said:
The first question I would like to ask is how you actually run the game, as I didn't make an application bundle before. You can get that at http://www.dennisbijlsma.com/data/ferrari3d/ferrari3d_macosx.zip.

I used a command line instruction (now converted to a bash script).

if [ "$1" = "noprof" ] ; then
  echo "Run ferrari3d alone."
  java -jar -Xmx256m -classpath ./libraries/jme.jar:./libraries/lwjgl.jar:./libraries/platinumlaf2.jar:./libraries/quaqua.jar:./libraries/utilities.jar -Djava.library.path=./libraries ferrari3d.jar
elif [ "$1" != "noprof" ] ; then
  echo "Run ferrari3d with profiler."
  java -jar -Xmx256m -classpath ./libraries/jme.jar:./libraries/lwjgl.jar:./libraries/platinumlaf2.jar:./libraries/quaqua.jar:./libraries/utilities.jar -Djava.library.path=./libraries -javaagent:/Applications/profiler4j-1.0-beta2/agent.jar ferrari3d.jar
fi

keeskist said:
The first thing that I would guess from the combination of poor framerates and graphical problems, is that some operation is not supported by your graphics card.

It is exactly the same idea I have. But I don't know how to isolate the problem. Generally JMEDesktop is a jME feature that gives a lot of problems with Mac. So, at the beginning I guessed that it could be the reason. But, after those experiments I changed my idea and I think that is something related to 3D GL, as to say LWGJL or jME.

keeskist said:
It could be something with the bumpmap that the track uses, although it does seem to look OK in the last screenshot. Another possibility is that sorting Zs is really slow for some reason.

The important thing is the strange behaviour. There is something that triggers only if I turn right relative to the track direction. Anyway I will test it more to see what exactly happens there.
If we discover any bug related to some Mac OS configuration in LWJGL and/or jME I will try to understand if I can fix it. Or if the authors can fix it for me.

keeskist said:
From the profiler shot I see that loading the circuit takes up 11 seconds. Even though that's by far the largest piece of geometry I'll check if something is taking up an unreasonable amount of time there.

Thanks.

I would say that this is either some fault by me, or an incorrect OBJ or JME file with one of the models.

Perhaps you could just remove some objects to see what the problem is. The model is stored in <installDir>/circuits/monza/monza.f3d, which is just an XML file with a weird name. You can just delete one of the <node> tags and the game will still run. The most likely candidates to be causing problems are "monza", which is the grass/dirt/etc, "tarmac", and the trees node who's name I have forgotten.