Picking a library/engine

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

My goal: Make a 3D MMO game with low requirements (therefore, capable of the most horrible graphics known to men). The world would be like Runescape in that characters will be highly customizable, capable of emotes and changing clothes (yet the indoors will be separate rooms).

Target PC: Pentium 4-esque with integrated graphics (at least for the lowest quality) Therefore, I guess I should be able to run OpenGL 1.2 at lowest.

I have ample knowledge in Java and several knowledge in 2D game making… just a complete noob on everything 3D. So I could use pure lwjgl, but I have no idea of how to add animations in there. I read about bones and armature and that seems what I need for my models, but I also read it’s not trivial to implement, so probably an engine or library that already has it implemented would be the way to go.

What would be the best library/engine for this?

#2

libgdx can provide you a solid foundation:
http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/
More 3D stuff will be added in the next week:
http://www.badlogicgames.com/wordpress/
Or you could go for a 3D scene graph lib:
http://www.ardor3d.com/
http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/

#3

libgdx already says
“We might go GLES 2.0 exclusive for this as it makes my life easier”
Wouldn’t this already discard many integrated graphic cards?

jmonkeyengine says it needs a minimum of opengl 2.0. So, it’s a no…

Ardor 3D on the other hand… I’m looking into it more in-depth.
Thanks.

#4

Ah, I guess if libgdx goes that route it would require OpenGL >= 2 on the desktop, though I don’t actually know how many GPUs this would discard.

#5

The Intel GMA 950 supports up to 1.4, and it’s present on several laptops and some macs.
The 3150 is the only Intel for netbooks that supports 2.0, and that’s only on Linux. Windows goes up to 1.5.

As for Pentium 4… I’ve searched and I find no information on opengl… is there a way to use switch between directx or opengl without rebuilding the app? (more than if there’s a way, what would be the way other than me coding it? If there’s one)

#6

If you’re writing it in Java, forget about DirectX completely, there is basically no Java support for it (LWJGL used to target Direct3D a while back but it hasn’t in years). They are very different APIs.

Targeting low-end hardware is fine, but you really should make a distinction between low spec current hardware and ten year old truly obsolete platforms like the P4. The supporting graphics chipsets are vastly different in terms of capabilities, and you really shouldn’t waste time on platforms that maybe 5% of your userbase actually powers up on a daily basis.

#7

Touche… I hadn’t noticed they are that old. Time flies… I feel old D:

Alright, I’ll go more in-depth with Ardor3D, and if not, I found enough resources to get skeletal animation running for lwjgl pure.