jMonkeyEngine 3.1 Alpha 2 Released

 

jMonkeyEngine is a popular open source 3D game engine written in Java.  I did a “Closer Look at” jMonkeyEngine earlier last year if you want more information.  The big part of this release isn’t really all that flashy, but it is smart.  You see up until now, jMonkeyEngine has been heavily tied to the NetBeans IDE, an IDE used by about 4 people.  (Yeah, hyperbole…).  This has advantages, it makes for a turn key package but at the cost of tying the two together making for slow release schedules from the jME team, as well as adding a lot of complications for developers that want to work in a different IDE such as Eclipse or IntelliJ.  jME 3.1 is all about seperating jME the SDK from jME the toolchain.  This means jME should be easier to get started with for non-NetBeans developers and that future releases should come at a quicker pace.

 

From the announcement:

New Features

  • jME3 Maven artifacts are now available on JCenter! (thanks @davidB and @pspeed42) Note that Nifty-GUI and JBullet still require using the jME3 private Maven repo. Please see the wiki page for more information.
  • LWJGL3 support (beta) (thanks @DannyJo)
  • Improved OpenGL 3.2 core profile support
  • JOGL backend improvements to support new unified renderer backend
  • New constructors for lights: #297
  • Ability to toggle lights on or off: #393
  • Allow to set min / mag filter in J3M files: #295
  • Support bounding spheres with light culling: #362
  • Allow overriding dead zone per joystick axis: @46794e2
  • Add support for non-public constructors in networking serialization: @50b2f76
  • Rendering performance improved (less GL calls)

Fixed Bugs

  • Fix physics angular factor deserialization: #383
  • Fix GImpactCollisionShape for native bullet: #188
  • Fix BetterCharacterControl flickering: #391
  • Fix crash on ARM8 android devices: #378
  • Fix framebuffer crash on some OpenGL drivers: @78d2d6e
  • Fix regression in Node.collideWith(): @31cab67
  • Fix native bullet ray cast / sweep test crash: @86439c2
  • Fix clone method for lights: @6c4e801
  • Fix collideWith method for BatchNode: @1073eba
  • Fix broken culling when using negative scaling: @495e0cf
  • Fix FXAA quality regression: @4a37a8f
  • Fix lighting color ramp feature: @01227d3
  • Fix network client and server running in same JVM: @2c33712
  • Fix various race conditions in networking
  • Blender Loader various fixes

Other

  • ColoredTextured.j3md is now deprecated

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