The biggest change in this release is the move away from our SDK. From now on we will distribute the jME3 engine separately from the NetBeans Platform-based SDK.
Our community will continue to support the SDK, but the plan is to gradually transition the most essential features of the SDK into standalone tools that don’t depend on an IDE.
The biggest upside of this change is that this enables us to push releases way faster than before. The next alpha release should be out some time in March/April. Now that we’ve committed the cardinal sin of giving an ETA there’s no going back.