Does anybody know of a Java 3d engine with gui,tools etc like other commercial engines?
In fact, I don’t know what does commerical engine look like. I downloaded the Quake Engine but it doesn’t have any GUI interface. But here is a link for some Java3D Engines also others:
http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html
You may find what you want there.
Have fun
HKSDU
Hi,
there is Opale.Soya, which was used for the game Arkanae (http://arkanae.tuxfamily.org/). The engine is not supported anymore, but it is open source. It has a fine OO design and an integrated editor.
My engine you can find at http://javaisdoomed.sourceforge.net it is also open source.
ciao torsten
Check out http://www.jpct.net/
I had my own little world up and running in a morning. Really stable.
Are there any others? Javaisdoomed seems to look nice but there’s nothing to download.
I mean there must be something at least on the same level as the quake engine. What comes closest to it was this jPCT-demo-application and IMHO it’s kinda sad (as impressive as it is) that with Java3D and GL4Java out there, nothing like that should be possible that makes use of hardware acceleration…???
lwjgl?
though, it can’t be realy called an engine ;D (more of a OGL1.4 java wrapper)
Still waiting for some bright spark to write a scenegraph on top of it…
Cas 
[quote]Still waiting for some bright spark to write a scenegraph on top of it…
Cas
[/quote]
Doesn’t that mean that you would reinvent the wheel (i.e. Java3D)?? I’m looking for a 3d engine optimized for games, not a scenegraph API. I mean the native world has Unreal 2 and Doom III-type graphics and Java has…what???
What do you mean by a 3D engine as opposed to a system that handles displaying, texturing, lighting and animating 3D objects?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here.
[quote]What do you mean by a 3D engine as opposed to a system that handles displaying, texturing, lighting and animating 3D objects?
[/quote]
I think that IS a 3D engine, in conjunction with sophisticated object culling, scene management, animation, collision detection, picking, resource management, various sorts( textures, alpha…), terrain rendering, maybe editors, performance tools, configuration options, debugging aids, a predefined content production path, an effects library, physics system, tesselation … (continue to infinity)…
A 3D engine is all the things that is not covered by a rendering API like GL4Java, LWJLGLJ and such.
By those features you distinguish good from bad, they make the difference between a 3D asteroids clone and UT2003.
Java3D has many of the features, j3d.org e.g. adds some more.
[quote]What do you mean by a 3D engine as opposed to a system that handles displaying, texturing, lighting and animating 3D objects?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here.
[/quote]
Yes, that’s what i’m talking about. LWJGL is no such thing. And scenegraph-oriented APIs like Java3d are not very well suited to make games with them IMO. It may be possible, but what i was talking about was a kind of Quake2/3-engine on top of something like LWJGL (i really hate this name btw… ;D )
In “native world” there are Quake level viewers like there’s no tomorrow and for Java…?..nada! I don’t have the experience (3d wise) to write one but i would like to see such thing in Java. That’s why i asked!
you have the HUMID engine on top of java3d. A quake like game* was done with it some time ago, and if you were lucky, you could grab a video somewhere around here.
*: i wrote game as it seemed not to be a prerecorded demo, but none of us, buddies of no major companies, had the chance to test it.
It never went public, as some other should have to.
Maybe Java3D can be tailored to evaluate BSP structures as well, but this will be some effort again.
But there are still enough non-quake games. And the quake-genre is well covered by very good products anyway. Hard to get in there even w/o Java!
Even in C+±world, theres no engine for everything. There are scenegraphs and BSP-engines. So take Java3D only for the things it was made for.
Hey, not to de-rail this thread but I have to say, looking at the comments made here, I feel like the problems that exist in J2EE (specifically EJBs) are emerging in J3D. How can I make this comparision, you ask? Well, in J2EE’s case, they developed a whole series of technologies that was made to save the developer the trouble of figuring out persistance, managing transactions, object pooling, etc all sorts of other stuff that should help make applications run fast and stable. Unfortunately, no one at first really understood the best applications for the technology, and thus made the technology look bad because it was misapplied. IMO, J2EE attempted to do too much in design, but did very specific things well in implementation. Enter J3D: Designed to model ‘universes’ with an API that can handle anything and everything imagineable, but an implementation that does a few things very well, and other things need work. There have been good J3D demos, and bad ones (Just like EJB based apps).
Getting to my point: We need someone in the know who has a proven trackrecord of using the J3D technology to lay out what J3D is useful for and where it is lacking…so that developers can understand where the shortcommings and pitfalls are and won’t produce crap because the system isn’t built to support it. It would definitely spur development of software based on J3D because more people would have more satisfying results in their efforts because they will understand the good and bad practices with using the API…There’s books written on EJB-Antipatters, we need the same sort of thing with J3D. Sooner rather than later would be better before too many people get frustruated and give up.
-Chris
[quote]And scenegraph-oriented APIs like Java3d are not very well suited to make games with them IMO.
[/quote]
Unlike scenegraph-oriented API’s like NetImmerse, used for Morrowind, Dark Age of Camelot, Freedom Force and many others?
What you are talking about is actually a 3d game that ships with a bunch of editing tools, it seems to me. I am in agreement with Herkules here- Java3D is a 3d engine- it a whole lot of functionality, but not much of it really appeals to less committed programmers and there is not much in the way of simple game-oriented tutorials for it to introduce less experienced 3d programmers to how it works. You have a few things on how to make some simple primitives and light and colour them and you’re left to work it out for yourself from that point onwards. There are only a couple of books on the topic and apart from Selman, which is a few releases old now, you don’t actually get much more than a fleshing out of the Javadoc in those, from what I can tell. The Javadoc is great, but if you don’t know what API you’re looking for it’s not always a tremendous help.
I’m with Chris on this one. Too many features in the soup, no-one knows how they all fit together.
Oh, and J2EE fell into the trap of being so expensive for a “commercial” offering that it’s a joke. That’s why we wrote our own J2EE-like server, without all the bells and whistles, etc. which we own, and understand. And why we wrote LWJGL as well for that matter.
Cas
Staying OT with j2EE I always feel a bit insecure about it, too- there are so many features that I always have this niggling feeling that I’m using the wrong one and that there is a much easier way to do everything. I’m sure it’s a great tool but most of the people I’ve done web development for just don’t need that much functionality.
I’ll reserve comment on J3D until I’m good enough with it to know what I’m talking about…
Re: cost of commercial offerings, Tomcat and JBoss provide a very capable J2EE platform. I expect most people who can’t justify BEA would be fine running these instead.
[quote]I’m sure it’s a great tool but most of the people I’ve done web development for just don’t need that much functionality.
[/quote]
I quite agree - things like EJBs are misused in probably 90% of cases. They’re much too heavyweight for most people’s requirements.
[quote]I’ll reserve comment on J3D until I’m good enough with it to know what I’m talking about…
[/quote]
Good answer! ;D I will too, except to say that NetImmerse is specifically developed for use in games development; Java3D is a general 3D visualisation API. I’m sure we all here appreciate that games often have very different requirements from most applications - does Java3D have enough of a “professional” reputation that people don’t feel easy using it for games?
Ok, I f’d this thread by pulling it OT, but I’ll try to bring it back OT with this comment:
Dear Sun,
Please please release some developer oriented tools that allow people to quicly and easily work with the J3D API (IE get something useful done quickly with little fuss) while at the same time letting developers get under the covers so they can have a more intimiate idea of what is going on (which so far you are doing fine, it’s amazing what people have managed to put togehter without tools). Please don’t make the same mistake as you did with J2EE where you made a reference implementation (clap clap) but threw it out to the development comunity without the toolset to apply the technology effectively (boo boo). I know this sounds a lot like what MS does with their technologies, but they aren’t doing everything wrong.
-Chris