Hi, I’m nehon from the jMonkeyEngine dev core team.
It’s hard for me to answer the topic, because I admit I’m totally biased toward JME, but I thought I could give some answers to some questions/comments.
About the Shader oriented renderer. That’s the idea jme 3 was build upon. We do have a fixed pipeline fallback, but that’s just that, a fallback. Nowadays even mobile devices support shaders, and I guess you can’t build an engine with outdated technologies in mind. I’m not sure a lot of people are looking for an engine so that their game runs on hardware from year 2000, at least I hope it’s not their main interest.
About the “I don’t want my game to look the same as another JME game”. I can’t see how it could happen. Our test assets are just here to test really and most people use them as placeholders until they have real assets. You can make your game look what ever you want to, you have complete control on that with JME.
About the “It’s frightening because it’s done for AAA games”. Well…first…thank you…we usually have this the other way around :p. but JME won’t make your game looks good, you will (or not :p). You can make very basic games with JME.
About the “I want absolute control so I’d rather do my own engine”. I understand that, and in a way that’s what we do :p. But we try to make it accessible for less experienced developers, and also let more savvy developer have their fun and go deep into the engine. There are some very low level things you can’t do with JME. Low level things you guys like to have your hands on.
But the beauty of it is that you have complete access to the code, and the right to fork the engine at your will. I doubt one could do such things with Unity.
There are some examples of companies that used JME for commercial games, with a forked version and that contributed back some of their changes.
About the “basic phong lighting shading”. that’s true. But users that might want to do their own lighting shader can do it very easily (providing they have the knowledge to do so). Also we recently introduced a more modular shader system. We are also planning to make a full deferred rendering system in later versions of the engine.
@gouessej, we don’t consider your JOGL renderer as crap or even as a fallback. We dropped JOGL support some time ago because we didn’t want to have to maintain one more renderer with no benefit to it.
Now, we recently had some issues with lwjgl+osx+java 7 and we considered JOGL again to have an alternative when these kind of issues arise. We’re glad and grateful of all the work you’re putting into it.
Now for the OP’s question, “why not more JGO members use JME”. Well I guess there are some that do. I hope so. But I also hope some use Ardor 3D, libgdx, JOGL, LWJGL or have their own JNI bridge to opengl or whatever. I think that’s the very point of this community. We need some unbiased point of views, we need some competition, and we need people that know how things work under the hood.
IMO, this thread just proves there are plenty alternatives when you want to make a game with java…and that’s a very good thing.
