In the last few days, a lot of interesting discussions have taken place on the jME forums. This is a good sign, that the community is active and commited to the project.

The first discussion is about the future of the jMonkeyEngine. Since the lead developer (Joshua Slack, aka renanse) announced, that he is going to step back, and even create a new engine called Ardor3D, some people were wondering, what direction the jME would take. In my opinion, this discussion is very important, because it helps the project to get more professional.

The jMonkeyEngine has gained a lot of interest in the past, and this is mostly due to the public relations work of Joshua, i'd say. There are already a lot of open source projects out there, that are using the jME or have announced to use it in the future. With all those projects, the popularity of the engine will get even bigger over time. But on the other hand, with more and more projects using the engine, the constraints are getting bigger as well. The jME can't be redesigned so easily anymore, because there is a strong need for backward compatibility. And this is the reason, why it is crucial to have some more professionalism.

I'm sure, that the project is on the right track for that. Another aspect of this, is the current development of a reference implementation for the engine, under the roof of the project. The discussion for this, can be found here and here. I hope that with this project, we can identify some of the missing parts in the jMonkeyEngine. What we will do there, is to simulate a real world gaming project, and that will tell us something about the underlying engine. The goal for this project is not only a reference implementation and a fun game, but also the improvemnet of the jME.