Ease of Transition and where Xith is at?

Engines, Libraries and Tools Xith3D Forums
#1

So I’ve been looking out some of my old J3d stuff and it’s fine but it crosses my mind that I don’t really want to be reinventing the wheel anymore, what I would like to be able to do is start putting my content into a setting and get it working without having to understand every aspect of the java3d internals so I’m wondering what Xith can offer on that front. I’m not too worried about the highest level stuff but to start with I need to be able to load models, draw and interact with terrain and have a working in-game UI. So a couple of questions really:

Firstly, how stable is it?
Secondly, how easy is it to learn to use Xith if you’ve got a fair understanding of Java3d?
Finally what are the main practical advantages of Xith in terms of performance and productivity?
I don’t really care about the philosophy or the ethics of the thing, I just want to know if I’ll be able to get stuff developed more quickly if I use Xith rather than J3d…

#2

Stability…I have never experienced a Xith excpetion, memory hoggieness, or performance degradation over time
Xith is "for the most part Java3D’
- execution is within a user whike loop, which allows significantly tighter rendering control, you don’t have bahavior…executing somewhere, sometime, in the future
- lights behave a little differently…documented elsewhere
- limited behavior support…big deal
- Has a minmal UI, swing rendered into the scene, foreground nodes for HUDs,
- every Java3D to Xith render comparison show Xith faster, sometimes many times faster.
- resonably active user community
- a number of demo’s
- loaders for numerous object formats.

For me, the ability to have absolute control over the render cycle is a major major Xith advantage.

#3

Actually not: http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=11748.0

#4

Responded in different area. I summerize

FPS is not perfomance, it is a part of performance

javacooldudes benchmarks show the exact opposite…benchmark, hence results, differ. Age old problem.

http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=3549.0

#5

Possibly JCD’s stuff was running on the last Sun version of Java3d and the more even paced results were coming from the newer community version?