It is truly a historic day ladies and gentlemen! For today, on the 17th of May, Norway became independent. Oh, and jMonkeyEngine 3.0 releases its first official ALPHA!

Direct Download – jME3 SDK Alpha1, no questions asked, for the impatient and daring.

We have decided to release jME3 in two different packages:

1. jMonkeyEngine3 SDK (includes jMonkeyEngine3 and jMonkeyPlatform)
2. jMonkeyEngine3 Standalone (includes jMonkeyEngine3 only)

Go to our download repository and pick whichever flavor suits you.
(more…)

If you’re afraid of SVN, fear no more. jME3 builds are now available to download right here:

http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/nightly/

Included you will receive the jars, libs, and javadoc, all that is necessary to use jME3 in an application. Developers who want to view the source code or compile jME3 should use SVN instead.

Note that the date in the builds are in US format, e.g the first number is month, then followed by the day of the month, not the other way like in Europe.

For those who haven’t heard, NiftyGUI is a powerful and flexible GUI library for games and multimedia applications. I have taken some time to write a complete implementation of NiftyGUI for jME3.  This means you can now write user interfaces for jME3 easily by using this library! Nifty uses XML internally, so no Java experience required to make the guis, plus it supports a wide range of effects and styles. Update from SVN and check jme3test.niftygui.TestNiftyGui to see the official tutorial demo running in jME3.

Also an mention should also be given to some efforts to get Nifty to work in jME2. void256, the creator of NiftyGUI himself is directing that implementation. An attempt is already in NiftyGUI SVN. It isn’t ready for use yet, but it will be soon.

Please join us in the welcome of Normen Hansen  ‘normen‘ to the jMonkey Engine ‘core team’. This entity, the ‘core’, has yet to be properly detailed in a more public, formal manner. Regardless, it represents the small group of dedicated people whos main goal is to further ‘jMonkey’ and everything it stands for. To reiterate, the team is now as follows, in order of join date.

The ‘Core Team’

Kirill Vainer ‘Momoko_Fan’

Lead Programmer, jME3 Architect
Student at New Jersey Institute of Technology

Erlend Sogge Heggen ‘Sadr‘

Project Manager, Junior Webmaster
Student at Vancouver Film School (on-hiatus)

Skye Book ’sbook’

Project Manager, Senior Webmaster
Student at Polytechnic Institute of NYU

Normen Hansen ‘normen’

GDE architect & general integrations
Engineer at a theater in Bremen

We have been in close contact with Normen over the course of three weeks now, getting to know his personality and working habits. Reckon he’ll fit in just fine

Normen’s prevalent projects:

jBullet-JME
This jBullet integration coupled with Normen’s overall dedication on the forum is what made him stick out in the first place. This integration will almost certainly find its way into JME3 at a later point, so it’s well worth getting affiliated with.

GDE for JME3
This here is Normen’s pet project, and will probably stay as such for some good weeks ahead. With an influx of novice programmers (e.g. ‘designers’ such as myself) we have seen an increased interest in JME usability. A full featured GDE is just what we need to widen JME’s appeal to all kinds of game designers, without affecting the solid base of technology underneath.

Thanks for listening, and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you think you could be an asset to the JME project.

contact@jmonkeyengine.com

~ Erlend Sogge Heggen