JSR-184 is available for public review…
http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr184/index.html
Review closes June 12…
Reviewing…
Looks pretty “full-featured” so far.
Anyone know who the Sun reps were on the Expert Group?
There is allot of J3D in there…
Me. 
How are you doing Shawn, see you next week.
Doug.
Hey Doug… just read your bio at java.sun.com
"Doug Twilleager is the Chief Architect of Java Gaming Technologies being developed in the software technology office at Sun Microsystems. Previously, he was one of the architects of Java 3D. Twilleager also has worked on graphics technologies such as OpenGL and worked in the graphics hardware architecture group at Sun. "
So you aren’t working on Java 3D anymore?
I hope Java 3D will continue to evolve, or is it expected that Java 3D will not be used for desktop games in favour of the new Mobile API? Is Java 3D 1.4 still happening?
We’ll be putting OpenGL ES in LWJGL as well Just to keep competition sweet.
Cas
I’m not directly involved in Java 3D development anymore, but I am involved in its evolution. Java 3D 1.4 is in a holding pattern right now. We are working on different possibilities.
We will be announcing alternatives next week. 
Alternatives to Java3D? Means no Java3D any more?
Dare to break my code…
I said alternative - not replacement. Java 3D is not going away.
Doug.
[quote]I’m not directly involved in Java 3D development anymore, but I am involved in its evolution. Java 3D 1.4 is in a holding pattern right now. We are working on different possibilities.
We will be announcing alternatives next week.
[/quote]
Hi, Doug.
Please pardon my low english skills, but what does ‘in a holding pattern’ means precisely ? What dev state does it relate to? Is it stalled? Close to release?
Thanks a lot.
juliet-three-delta, HARDCODE tower…
juliet-three-delta, are you ready to copy?..
juliet-three-delta, leave holding pattern, descent to 1000feet, enter traffic circuit downwind, report base one-four…
juliet-three-delta, cleared to land one-four!!
It is stalled. We are looking at ways to get it going again.
Doug.
Hey Doug,
Great to hear about the Gaming initiative. Anything you can share about what you will be working on?
-Z
Unfortunately, when something becomes stalled at Sun, it dies. The same thing happened with a number of other APIs, such as JSDT. It’s been 3 years now and they’re still saying “We’re trying to work out a way to keep it going”. People are interested in maintaining the code. However, if JSDT is any guide, don’t expect people or companies to become really interested in helping out unless it becomes completely open-sourced. Right now, I hold exceedingly little hope for Java3D’s future in terms of expansion and feature addition. I’ve yet to work out what I’m going to do with j3d.org.
Just an idea - would it be possible to reimplement most important parts of java3d in opensource project ?
There are part of java3d which could be ignored - GeometryCompression for example (I don’t think anybody is using it anyway), possibly some other classes. Utility classes and javax.vecmath could be just taken from existing java3d (and I think that it is possible to ask Sun to ‘free’ these both packages, contrary to core java3d).
I know it is a lot of work - but hopefully, it could be made in incremental manner, by getting more and more complicated programs to work.
I’m just not sure if it is worth it - maybe everybody just will do better by implementing their minimal, just-what-is-needed scenegraphs on top of opengl, instead of putting time into reimplemeting specific java3d quirks.
This is all a little glib, just because its happened before doesn’t mean it has to happen again. Java3D brings alot to the party, maybe not as much to the gaming arena, but there are plenty of other uses for 3d visualisation.
I imagine its Java 3D 1.4 that is “stalled” right now (most of the new stuff is only really important to the gaming community). We have a perfectly good reason for this to be stalled, e.g. Sun going through a bit spate of reorg with respect to gaming.
I’m not trying to say its all rosey, just that second guessing these things tends to be pretty futile and could possibly drive new comers to java3d away (with potentionally no good reason).
Kev
[quote]It is stalled. We are looking at ways to get it going again.
Doug.
[/quote]
I’m somewhat disapointed, but i gues i’ll have to wait what is said at javaone to react if things don’t go the right way.
Then, j3d.org might be a good place to start a lobby or something more appropriate, if necessary.
Java3D has received a lot of slatings from game programming types , and rightly so, as it doesn’t quite cut it in a very competitive industry. There’s a gulf between a generic scenegraph and a game “engine”.
What a lot of people seem to think though is that Java3D isn’t any good for games development. I’m very interested in using the J3D model loaders to load data out of Max and save them in my own ready-to-render format. Very much like Quake has separate tools to do its editing which don’t use the quake runtime engine to draw. You see the difference here?
So while those of us who are concentrating on rendering in the best possible way get on with it, Java3D could be deliberately emphasised as what it’s best at which is a scenegraph manipulator, and the realtim rendering capabilities could be removed. Of course that would break everyone’s code Never mind.
Just a thought, anyway.
Cas
(Isn’t this becoming a bit of duplication of another post, probably more applicable here to be honest.)
Saying “java3d isn’t good for gaming” is just close minded speak. It completely depends on the type of game. If you’re talking slow paced game, you reduce complexity of the realtime rendering by using Java3D. If you need super fast rendering, I agree, something like GL4Java is more applicable, although, if this is your real requirement you might consider using good OO practice in C++.
Don’t get me wrong, you see people using Java3D, attempting to write games that compete visually with direct GL bindings, as its just not possible (atm). Apart from anything else you can’t get to half the extensions.
As to removing the realtime parts of Java 3D? Java 3D is perfectly capable of doing realtime rendering, just not to the performance on direct GL bindings… so, why would anyone want to do that?
Kev
The rendering capabilities should not be removed from Java3D, just separated from the scenegraph and made accessable to programmers. I think having a well-designed rendering API that can be implemented using either DirectX, OpenGL, various console APIs or any other underlying graphics solution out there would be good. I think this refactoring was on the plan list for J3D 1.4 though.