jmonkeyengine - 3D mit Java

jmonkeyengine ist eine freie Java-3D-Engine welche vor kurzem in der Version 1.1 erschienen ist. Mit jmonkeyengine ist es auch Java-Entwicklern möglich ansprechende 3D-Inhalte zu generieren und einzubinden. Hierbei wird eine große Auswahl an 3D-Formaten unterstützt, auch sind schon einige Erweiterungen wie eine Physik-Engine und ein Editor verfügbar. Auf der Homepage von jmonkeyengine gibt es eine beträchtliche Anzahl von Grafikdemos. Damit mausert jmonkeyengine sich zum Game-Development-Toolkit für Java Entwickler.

Anbei eine „kurze“ Auflistung der unterstützten Features:

Sample Applications

• Game system allows for maintenance of the main game loop
• SimpleGame provides a quick entry point for proof of concepts
• GameState provides ability to change game states (menu, game, credits, etc)

Embedded Integration

• Java Applet
• AWT/Swing
• SWT through user code

Import / Export

• Fast and compact jME binary format
• Extensible to allow other import/export formats (XML is planned)

Bounding System

• All geometry can be enclosed in a bounding system.
• Boxes, Capsules and Spheres.

Curves

• Bezier curves can be used for node controlling.

Bezier Mesh

• For smooth curved surfaces.
• Font Meshes
• Ability to generate 3d meshes from fonts.

Effects

• GLSL Shader Support
• Vertex and Fragment Program Support (ARB Shaders)
• High Quality Water with configurable reflection, refraction, wave generation, etc.
• Bloom
• Extensible Particle System.
• Lens Flare.
• Cloth Simulation.
• Screen tinting.
• Texture based dot3 bump-mapping

Image Loading

• Support BMP, uncompressed TGA, JPG, PNG, GIF, DDS.

Texture System

• Supports mipmapping, environmental mapping, multitexturing.

Input System

• Robust system allows for easy creation of input actions.

Collision and Picking

• Efficient bounding volume and triangle accurate picking and collision.

Lighting System

• Handles up to eight lights at a time with utilities for optimal light selection.
• Supports directional light, spot light and point light.

Shadow System

• Z-Pass Shadow Volumes.

Math Library

• Provides faster system for linear algebra
• Use of look up tables.

Level of Detail

• Discrete Level of Detail using a switching mechanism for fast model switching.
• Continuous Level of Detail dynamically collapses triangles of a single model.

Model Loading

• COLLADA, 3DS, Obj, MD2, MD3, Milkshape, ASE support.
• Supports skin and bones and weighted skeletal animation.

Shape Primitives

• Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Capsule, Torus, Arrow, Disk, Hexagon, Dodecahedron, Icosahedron, Octahedron, PQTorus, Pyramid and Quad support.

State System

• Minimizes OpenGL state changes by tracking and managing the status of the OpenGL machine.
• Allows merging of Texture and Light states in the tree.

Camera System

• Maintains camera as a separate object or a node in the scene.
• Frustum culling for efficiency.

Renderer Abstraction

• Allows for any rendering API to be implemented.
• Currently LWJGL 1.0 implemented.

Render Queue

• Sorts scene elements based on Opacity. Opaque are sorted front to back and rendered first, then transparent is sorted back to front, last screen elements are sorted by z depth.

Render to Texture

• Render any scene to a texture object (currently requires FBO support)

Imposters

• Render to texture used to display a single model to a texture, can be animated as slow as needed to increase frame rate.

Billboard Node

• Keeps a node facing the camera

Sound

• Supports OpenAL and FMOD
• Music queue system

Terrain

• Terrain blocks act as single geometry.
• Terrain Pages implements a Quad tree of Terrain blocks.

User Interface

• JMEDesktop System allows rendering of Swing components in jME scenes.