JMonkeyEngine

Last updated
jMonkeyEngine
Developer(s) The jME core team
Stable release
3.6.1 / June 23, 2023;9 months ago (2023-06-23) [1]
Repository
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Platform Java (JVM)
Type Game engine
License New BSD license
Website jmonkeyengine.org

jMonkeyEngine (abbreviated JME or jME) is an open-source and cross-platform game engine for developing 3D games written in Java. [2] It can be used to write games for Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi, Android, and iOS (currently in alpha testing). It uses Lightweight Java Game Library as its default renderer, and also supports another renderer based on Java OpenGL.

Contents

jMonkeyEngine is community-centric and open-source. It is released under the New BSD license. It is used by several commercial game studios [3] [4] and educational institutions. [5] [6] [7] The default jMonkeyEngine 3 comes integrated with a software development kit (SDK).

jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK

By itself, jMonkeyEngine is a collection of computing libraries, making it a low-level game development tool. Coupled with an integrated development environment like the official jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK, it becomes a higher-level game development environment with multiple graphical components.

The SDK is based on the NetBeans Platform, enabling graphical editors and plugin capabilities. Alongside the default NetBeans update centers, the SDK has its own plugin repository and a selection between stable point releases or nightly updates.

Since March 5th, 2016, the SDK is no longer officially supported by the core team. It is still being actively maintained by the community. The term "jMonkeyPlatform" is also used interchangeably with "jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK."

History

jMonkeyEngine helps to improve the lack of full featured graphics engines written in Java. The project has evolved over time.

jMonkeyEngine 0.1 – 2.0

Version 0.1 to 2.0 of jMonkeyEngine marks the time from when the project was first established in 2003, until the last 2.0 version was released in 2008. When the original core developers gradually discontinued work on the project throughout the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, Version 2.0 had not yet been made officially stable. The code-base became adopted for commercial use and was most popular with the engine's community at the time.

2003 (2003)
Initial work on jMonkeyEngine was begun by Mark Powell (aka MojoMonkey) as a side project to see if a fully featured graphics API could be written in Java. Much of the early work on the API was inspired by David Eberly's C++ book 3D Game Engine Design.
January 2004 (2004-01)
Mark was joined by Joshua Slack (aka Renanse) and together over the following two years, with the help of other community contributors, a commercially viable API was developed.
August 15, 2008 (2008-08-15)
Joshua Slack announces to step back from active development of the jMonkeyEngine. [8] [9]

jMonkeyEngine 3.0

Since the departure of jME's core developers in late 2008, the codebase remained practically stagnant for several months. The community continued to commit patches, but the project was not moving in any clear direction. Development on Version 3.0 started as an experiment.

The first preview release of jME3 in early 2009 drew positive attention [10] from many members in the community, and the majority agreed that this new branch would be the official successor to jME 2.0. From there on, all the formalities were sorted out between the previous core developers and the new.

April 1, 2009 (2009-04-01)
Kirill Vainer "shadowislord" starts a new branch in the official jMonkeyEngine repository and commits the first publicly available code for jMonkeyEngine 3.0. Soon after, the branch was renamed to reflect its "test" status. [11]
June 24, 2009 (2009-06-24)
The project sees a new beginning in the official jMonkeyEngine 3.0 branch, initially designed and developed solely by Kirill Vainer. Management responsibilities are picked up by Erlend Sogge Heggen, shortly later accompanied by Skye Book. [12]
May 17, 2010 (2010-05-17)
The first Alpha of jMonkeyEngine 3 is released. [13] The same date marked the first Alpha release of the jMonkeyEngine SDK, only a few months after the first planning stages. [14] The "jMonkeyEngine SDK" has since become the default product download recommended to all jME3 developers.
September 7, 2010 (2010-09-07)
The jMonkeyEngine website was completely re-designed. A new domain, jmonkeyengine.org, is dedicated to all project and community activities. The old jmonkeyengine.com is re-purposed as a product promotion site. [15]
October 22, 2011 (2011-10-22)
jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK Beta is released. Stable update track is introduced as an alternative to downloading bleeding edge nightly builds. [16]
February 15, 2014 (2014-02-15)
jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK Stable is released. In spite of being technically stable for a long time, the official 3.0 SDK release was delayed until February 2014. [17]

Projects powered by jMonkeyEngine

Screenshot from Skullstone, showing jMonkeyEngine's capabilities Skullstone screen.jpg
Screenshot from Skullstone, showing jMonkeyEngine's capabilities

Reception

Ardor3D fork

Ardor3D began life on September 23, 2008, as a fork from jMonkeyEngine by Joshua Slack and Rikard Herlitz due to what they perceived as irreconcilable issues with naming, provenance, licensing, and community structure in that engine, [37] as well as a desire to back a powerful open-source Java engine with organized corporate support.

The first public release came January 2, 2009, with new releases following every few months thereafter. In 2011, Ardor3D was used in the Mars Curiosity mission both by NASA Ames [38] and NASA JPL [39] for visualizing terrain and rover movement.

On March 11, 2014, Joshua Slack announced that the project would be abandoned, although the software itself would remain under zlib license and continue to be freely available. [40] [41] However, a subset of Ardor3D called "JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation" [42] [43] was still actively maintained by Julien Gouesse as of 2014. [44] [45]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpiderMonkey</span> JavaScript and WebAssembly engine maintained by the Mozilla Foundation

SpiderMonkey is an open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine by the Mozilla Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LucasArts adventure games</span> Adventure games produced by LucasArts

From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, LucasArts was well known for their point-and-click graphic adventure games, nearly all of which received high scoring reviews at the time of their release. Their style tended towards the humorous, often irreverent or slapstick humor, with the exceptions of Loom and The Dig. Their game design philosophy was that the player should never die or reach a complete dead-end, although there were exceptions.

SWF is a defunct Adobe Flash file format that was used for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript.

Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. It is most well-known for its usage by Valve, but the engine has been used both by small teams and individuals to create modifications of Valve games, and other studios creating distinct games, notably Troika Games' title Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Valve continued to create incremental updates to the Source engine after its 2004 release, most of which coincided with games created by Valve. In the late 2010s, Valve created the Source 2 engine to replace Source, with it publicly debuting alongside Half-Life: Alyx. The Source engine is most well-known for its advancements in physics, AI, and graphics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Java 3D</span> Java 3D graphics API

Java 3D is a scene graph-based 3D application programming interface (API) for the Java platform. It runs on top of either OpenGL or Direct3D until version 1.6.0, which runs on top of Java OpenGL (JOGL). Since version 1.2, Java 3D has been developed under the Java Community Process. A Java 3D scene graph is a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CryEngine</span> Game engine by Crytek

CryEngine is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games. It has also been used for many third-party games under Crytek's licensing scheme, including Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 and SNOW. Warhorse Studios uses a modified version of the engine for their medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Ubisoft maintains an in-house, heavily modified version of CryEngine from the original Far Cry called the Dunia Engine, which is used in their later iterations of the Far Cry series.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a first-person shooter released for Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X using OpenGL and SDL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source video game</span> Video game whose source code is open-source software

An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible.

Super Monkey Ball is a series of arcade platform video games initially developed by Amusement Vision and published by Sega. The series debuted in 2001 with the arcade game Monkey Ball, which was ported to GameCube as Super Monkey Ball later that year. Several sequels and ports have been released.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JavaFX</span> Java software platform for GUI

JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering desktop applications, as well as rich web applications that can run across a wide variety of devices. JavaFX has support for desktop computers and web browsers on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, as well as mobile devices running iOS and Android, through Gluon Mobile.

Jake2 is a Java port of the GPL release of the Quake II game engine.

FBX (Filmbox) is a proprietary file format developed by Kaydara and owned by Autodesk since 2006. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications. FBX is also part of Autodesk Gameware, a series of video game middleware.

Titanium SDK is an open-source framework that allows the creation of native mobile applications on platforms iOS and Android from a single JavaScript codebase. It is presently developed by non-profit software foundation TiDev, Inc.

Open Game Art is a media repository intended for use with free and open source software video game projects, offering open content assets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Away3D</span>

Away3D is an open-source platform for developing interactive 3D graphics for video games and applications, in Adobe Flash or HTML5. The platform consists of a 3D world editor, a 3D graphics engine, a 3D physics engine and a compressed 3D model file format (AWD).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epic Citadel</span> 2010 tech demo

Epic Citadel is a tech demo developed by Epic Games to demonstrate the Unreal Engine 3 running on Apple iOS, within Adobe Flash Player Stage3D and using HTML5 WebGL technologies. It was also released for Android on January 29, 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Construct (game engine)</span> Visual HTML5-based 2D game editor

Construct is an HTML5-based 2D video game engine developed by Scirra Ltd. It is aimed primarily at non-programmers, allowing quick creation of games through visual programming. First released as a GPL-licensed DirectX 9 game engine for Microsoft Windows with Python programming on October 27, 2007, it later became proprietary software with Construct 2, as well as switching its API technology from DirectX to NW.js and HTML5, as well as removing Python and adding JavaScript support and its plugin SDK in 2012, and eventually switched to a subscription-based model as a web app.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horde3D</span> Open-source graphics engine

Horde3D is an open-source cross-platform graphics engine. Its purpose and design is similar to that of OGRE with the primary goal being lightweight for next-generation video games. The engine is also particularly suited for large crowd simulations. The engine is also compatible with GLFW. The major part of the graphics engine was originally written for the indie group pyropix and development is now continued at the University of Augsburg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Babylon.js</span>

Babylon.js is a JavaScript library and 3D engine for displaying real time 3D graphics in a web browser via HTML5. The source code is available on GitHub and distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

References

  1. ↑ "jMonkeyEngine 3.6.1-stable". github.com. Retrieved 2023-06-30.
  2. ↑ "JMONKEYENGINE". jMonkeyEngine.
  3. ↑ "Nord, a jME-powered MMOG developed by SLX Games". See website footer for reference.
  4. ↑ "bbgsite.com's review of Poisonville, a browser-based MMOFPS powered by jME". Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  5. ↑ "Southern Illinois University Game Development Class". Archived from the original on 2013-12-14. Retrieved 2013-12-14. Software Aspects of Game Development
  6. ↑ "Press Coverage of Georgia Tech Student Projects". Archived from the original on 2008-01-14.
  7. ↑ "Betaville Project at BxmC". Archived from the original on 2012-09-24.
  8. ↑ Joshua Slack (2008-08-15). "a break". jMonkeyEngine forum. Archived from the original on 2011-07-26. Retrieved 2009-08-12.
  9. ↑ Joshua Slack (2008-08-14). "At the end of the tour..." Archived from the original on 2009-07-03. Retrieved 2009-08-12.
  10. ↑ "jME3 project". jMonkeyEngine forum. 2009-04-01. Archived from the original on 2013-07-04. Retrieved 2013-04-23.
  11. ↑ Kirill Vainer (2009-04-01). "New Branch and Management". jMonkeyEngine GoogleCode Project.
  12. ↑ Erlend Sogge Heggen (2009-06-24). "New Branch and Management". jMonkeyEngine Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-01-01. Retrieved 2009-12-07.
  13. ↑ Erlend Sogge Heggen (2010-05-17). "First jME3 Alpha released". jMonkeyEngine Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-07-06. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  14. ↑ Normen Hansen (2010-02-01). "First jME3 SDK Alpha released, aka jMonkeyPlatform Alpha-1". jMonkeyEngine Forum. Archived from the original on 2010-09-30. Retrieved 2011-01-16.
  15. ↑ Erlend Sogge Heggen (2010-09-07). "Complete website redesign". jMonkeyEngine Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-11-13. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  16. ↑ Normen Hansen (2011-10-22). "jMonkeyEngine3 SDK Beta released!". jMonkeyEngine Blog. Archived from the original on 2011-12-24. Retrieved 2012-02-10.
  17. ↑ Erlend Sogge Heggen (2014-02-15). "jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK Stable released!". jMonkeyEngine Blog. Archived from the original on 2015-02-06. Retrieved 2015-09-20.
  18. ↑ "SLX Games Launches Nord on Facebook". EngageDigital / Authored by Alicia Ashby. 2010-09-16.
  19. ↑ "Nord: 3D Virtual World on Facebook". Beta Games. 2010-09-19.[ permanent dead link ]
  20. ↑ "Swedish SLX Games Takes First 3D MMO To Facebook". ArcticStartup. 2010-09-22. Archived from the original on 2012-10-30. Retrieved 2010-11-05.
  21. ↑ "Grappling Hook IndieDB entry". Christian Teister via IndieDB. 18 September 2009.
  22. ↑ John Walker (2009-09-24). "What It Says On The Tin: Grappling Hook". Rock Paper Shotgun .
  23. ↑ Michael Rose (2009-10-03). "Indie Game Pick: Grappling Hook (Speed Run Games)". Indie Games – The Weblog. Archived from the original on 2010-01-31. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  24. ↑ "Drohtin – The indie strategy Game". 2014-01-22. Archived from the original on 2014-01-13. Retrieved 2014-01-14.
  25. ↑ Idix, Prostate. "Interview: 4realms - Dossiers / Chroniques RPG France". www.rpgfrance.com (in French). Archived from the original on 2017-06-08. Retrieved 2017-07-27.
  26. ↑ "Skullstone - Dungeon Crawler in Development | News @ RPGWatch". www.rpgwatch.com. Retrieved 2017-07-27.
  27. ↑ "Skullstone | IGDB.com". IGDB.com. Retrieved 2017-07-27.
  28. ↑ "Spoxel | IGDB.com". IGDB.com. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
  29. ↑ "About Lightspeed Frontier | Lightspeed Frontier Official Wiki @ Gamepedia". lightspeedfrontier.gamepedia.com. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
  30. ↑ "Lightspeed Frontier | IGDB.com". IGDB.com. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
  31. ↑ "Subspace Infinity Source Repository | Github Repository". www.github.com/assofohdz/Subspace-Infinity. Retrieved 2018-05-09.
  32. ↑ MCV Editors (2019-05-15). "Making an indie hit: New Star Soccer uncovered". MCV. ISSN   1469-4832 . Retrieved 2023-04-27.{{cite news}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  33. ↑ "JavaOne presentation keynote". Oracle/Sun.
  34. ↑ "Presentation slides" (PDF). Oracle/Sun.
  35. ↑ "JavaOne blogpost with videos". jMonkeyEngine Blog. 2010-09-07. Archived from the original on 2011-07-26. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  36. ↑ "PacktPub nominees announcement". PacktPub. September 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-09-30. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  37. ↑ Joshua Slack (September 23, 2008). "A new focus: Ardor3D". Archived from the original on April 10, 2016.
  38. ↑ NASA (March 19, 2014). "NASA VERVE: Interactive 3D Visualization within Eclipse".
  39. ↑ NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and California Institute of Technology (September 17, 2009). "Interactive 3D Mars Visualization". YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-12-12.
  40. ↑ Joshua Slack (March 11, 2014). "Winding down". Archived from the original on December 2, 2014. Retrieved March 26, 2016.
  41. ↑ Joshua Slack (March 11, 2014). "Winding down". Archived from the original on April 10, 2016. Retrieved March 26, 2016.
  42. ↑ Julien Gouesse (November 22, 2014). "JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation user's guide is available".
  43. ↑ Julien Gouesse (August 2, 2014). "JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation overview".
  44. ↑ Julien Gouesse (November 22, 2014). "Official homepage and Github for Ardor3D".
  45. ↑ Julien Gouesse (March 17, 2014). "Ardor3D, JOGL 2". Archived from the original on December 2, 2014. Retrieved March 26, 2016.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.