Poweful 3D Egnine for Java
Sunday, 23. March 2008, 10:00:00
Have you ever thought of creating a 3D game? There is an Java engine that could help you and the best I have found so far - jMonkeyEngine. jMonkeyEngine is used already in several commercial games. Stable 1.0 version is available and 2.0 is currently under development.
If you are in doubts whether jMonkeyEngine is good enough for you, you should probably know that Sun has chosen it for Project Wonderland. The project is focused on creating online 3D collaborative environments. So you can be sure that jMonkeyEngine has a bright future with Sun in the background.
It was never so easy to create a game. No C-family language programming torture. Smooth running on every platform and even in browser. You won't probably compete with graphics of latest AAA titles, but you can get pretty good results - see screenshots. Also games are not only about graphics, right?
On the official site you will find a lot of resources, tutorials and forums to help you start. It won't take long and you will get first results rendered on your display. Except rendering 3D jMonkeyEngine also provides support for simple game logic, sound, user input and some other stuff related to creating computer games.
You can also expect that jMonkeyEngine will make it to Google Android as it supports OpenGL ES. See Joshua's Blog for more details about this effort.
Some features chosen from jMonkeyEngine website:
If you are in doubts whether jMonkeyEngine is good enough for you, you should probably know that Sun has chosen it for Project Wonderland. The project is focused on creating online 3D collaborative environments. So you can be sure that jMonkeyEngine has a bright future with Sun in the background.
It was never so easy to create a game. No C-family language programming torture. Smooth running on every platform and even in browser. You won't probably compete with graphics of latest AAA titles, but you can get pretty good results - see screenshots. Also games are not only about graphics, right?
On the official site you will find a lot of resources, tutorials and forums to help you start. It won't take long and you will get first results rendered on your display. Except rendering 3D jMonkeyEngine also provides support for simple game logic, sound, user input and some other stuff related to creating computer games.
You can also expect that jMonkeyEngine will make it to Google Android as it supports OpenGL ES. See Joshua's Blog for more details about this effort.
Some features chosen from jMonkeyEngine website:
- Java Applet and SWING support
- Fast and compact jME binary format
- Extensible to allow other import/export formats (XML is planned)
- All geometry can be enclosed in a bounding system - Boxes, Capsules and Spheres
- Bezier curves can be used for node controlling
- Bezier Mesh - For smooth curved surfaces
- Effects - GLSL Shader Support
- High Quality Water with configurable reflection, refraction, wave generation, etc.
- Extensible Particle System
- Lens Flare, Screen tinting
- Cloth Simulation
- Textures in BMP, uncompressed TGA, JPG, PNG, GIF, DDS
- Textures support mipmapping, environmental mapping, multitexturing
- Collision and Picking
- Lighting - Supports directional light, spot light and point light
- Z-Pass Shadow Volumes
- Continuous Level of Detail dynamically collapses triangles of a single model
- Model Loading - COLLADA, 3DS, Obj, MD2, MD3, Milkshape, ASE support
- Supports skin and bones and weighted skeletal animation
- Render to texture
- User Input System
- Supports OpenAL and FMOD
- ... more
. Some of them are really funny. I also plan to make public the keyboard to let you see what it was all about.
WIDGETIZE