I can do that.

So lately I've been playing around with jMonkeyEngine while the others continue work on the installer, which, at this very point in time, the are supposedly very close to being done completely. Finally. But back to jME.

I haven't really enjoyed the first experience. The entire engine is basically a massive tree of extended classes with almost no interfaces and little sense of a unified structure. Also, there are several pre-defined classes which handle a lot of basic functions for you but if you want to do anything custom you basically have to extend the framework which annoys me because then it's no longer an API; you have to learn the underlying system which completely destroys the concept of encapsulation. But I digress.

The purpose of getting to know the engine was because of a couple reasons. For our final product we need some kind of flashy client-side program, and a 3D game world is not only a good way to do this, but is also what many current MMO players are accustomed to (Text-based MUDs are a thing of the past). We heard from co-workers that jME was relatively easy to use and set up (despite my recent rant it IS a hell of a lot faster than just straight JOGL). The Project Darkstar team is also preparing a demo (Project Snowman, written using jME) and we were (possibly still are) throwing around the idea that using this as a code base for our own project could be a possibility. Thus, jME. But most importantly we also came to the realization that even if we did use jME it was doubtful that we could start from scratch and deliver a highly polished product. We need to focus on the Darkstar portion of the product and since we only have 5 more weeks we, unfortunately, don't have the time to play around with pretty graphics.

So yeah, that's what I've been doing. Today our advisor actually came into Sun and gave us a suprise visit (Well, it wasn't a suprise for anyone else. Apparently we were the only ones who didn't know. Go figure). Anyways we had a good discussion about what we had to next and such. I'll post a better description of all this later. MY job for the time being (while my friends scramble to finish the installer... :p) is to start combining Darkstar and jME to see if I can get some sort of rudimentary working demo done within the week (Sooner if possible, but that goes without saying). But first, I must go through the Darkstar tutorials and get a better understanding of how everything works.

And that's it. It's about 9:35 PM right now and I'm still kicking around Sun while my project partners finish up this installer. By the time I leave I'll have been here for about 12 hours. Long day. =/


And on a completely unrelated note:
"It's a stone, Luigi. You didn't make it!"