Hello.
I’m currently triying to develop a 3D game engine using JOGL.
We need to design all the classes and methos for this engine.
I’d like you give me some suggestions on how to get started on this (what should and shouldn’t do).
Thanks in advance.
Well, I don’t know how much knowledge do you have (maybe more then I :D), but my suggestion will be developing of Camera class first (and FPS movement if you are interested in it) which you can test then on some simple terrain. You can soon think on optimisations, like displaying only visible polys (frustum culling - connected with your Camera class). Then ask yourself do you want 3d engine for mostly outdoors or indoors. You will need to handle collisions. BPS trees or octrees are known methods for collisions and one is better then another in indoors/outdoors (im not sure which is for wich). When you have at least partially optimised engine, start to add 3d models in it.
And then is gameplay, it should take the most time, but you will see how much energy will you have after all that you build before 
If you don’t have experience developing games read a couple of books on the subject. I’d recommend Java Killer Game Programming and Practical Java Game Development. Probably the people here know other ones.
Thanks for the advices, but… what about game interaction with different devices (mouse, keyboard gamepads, joysticks, etc.)? ???
What about make the Library modular to keep extending it (for instance, support for physics libraries or loading scene files).
By the way, there are some books about JOGL like “Learning Java Bindings For OpenGL (JOGL)” by Gene Davis, but I find the content more to novice programmers and like nothing about the JOGL API :’(.
Another issue that we have encountered (specifically to new and/or novice members of the group) is that there are little info on the Internet about creating APIs/Libraries using JOGL or any other JAVA implementation.
The following resources are available to us right now:
- Computer Graphics with OpenGL (3rd Edition)
- Real-Time Rendering (2nd Edition)
- OpenGL SuperBible (3rd Edition) -
- OpenGL® Programming Guide : The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL®, Version 2
- Computer Graphics Using Open GL (2nd Edition)
- An Introduction to Ray tracing (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
- Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, Second Ed.
- Advanced Graphics Programming Using OpenGL (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
- Digital Design of Nature : Computer Generated Plants and Organics
- Physically Based Rendering : From Theory to Implementation (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology)
- GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics
- Algorithms for Image Processing and Computer Vision
- Machine Vision Algorithms in Java: Techniques and Implementation
- Image Processing: Analysis and Machine Vision
- Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing (Prentice Hall Information and System Sciences Series)
- Game Programming Gems (Game Programming Gems Series)
- Game Programming Gems 2 (Game Programming Gems Series)
- Game Programming Gems 4(Game Programming Gems Series)
- Game Programming Gems 5 (Game Programming Gems Series)
- Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications
- Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
We also have a an “IBM Intellistation M Pro” (http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/intellistation/pro/index.html) with an ATI FireGL V7100 graphics card and an Apple Cinema Display 30’ screen.
Finally, our institution granted access to the following publications: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and IEEE Trans. on Visualization in Computer Graphics.
Currently, there are 4 researchers associated to the project (mid-level expertise) and 5 undergrad students. We have about 18 months or so from now to create most of the engine, including any functional demo (although we all know that the real value would be on the code).
I’m open to more suggestions (specially the technical ones).
Also, what about performance benchmarks for this engine?
Thanks.