I’ve been playing with OpenGL (LWJGL) if you haven’t noticed from some of my forum activity, but I seem to be unable to gain a good grasp, I know what things do and how they work but I’m having problems with pretty much everything. so I was wondering if it would be a good Idea to move to JMonkeyEngine for a better grasp on things and how it all works together.
…no…lwjgl is just about as low as you can get in java when it comes to opengl. When you want to understand higher APIs better (such as java2D/libgdx) going lower is the right direction. You do not need to make a super fast game engine. Just get glBegin and glEnd going and maybe go into shaders, VBOs, few other little things and you should have no problems using a engine properly.
They key purpose of doing this (IMHBLQP) is that it is good to have an idea of what APIs do under the covers so you don’t do something they were not optimized/designed for. Libgdx is meant for multi platform lower hardware specs. Don’t expect it to let you do all sorts of fancy openGL stuff for you. (although it can) JMonkeyEngine is like libgdx in it abstracts stuff away from you so you don’t have to write mass amounts of code but you need to get an idea of what exactly it is doing when you call something like drawUI.
If you are saying that OpenGL is too confusing and you’d like something simpler that just let you get on with programming games, then yes: JME might be a good move. If you are wanting to understand OpenGL better, per se, then no - going to JME wouldn’t help that.
JME also has a lot of excellent tutorials and examples that will help you get started as well.
I’ll just stick with OpenGL (LWJGL)