Since i am a very lazy guy, especially when it comes to my spare time, i haven't done much for MonkeyWorld lately. There are so many things that distract me from doing real work.

I have updated my computer to Jaunty Jackalope Alpha, so i am currently doing alpha testing and play around with this new operating system. So far i'm impressed with this release. At first i was using GNOME, but now i've decided to switch to KDE 4.2 and i have to admit, it's fantastic.

Alpha testing an Ubuntu release is really much fun. Every day i download and install new updates. This means from day to day, i see this release getting better and better. I use the alpha on a daily base. I installed it dual boot with my openSUSE 11.1, but i never was in a situation, where i wanted or needed to boot into my "stable" system. Even on this day, when they introduced a regression with the X-server, that destroyed my desktop effects. But luckily, there were some workarounds available. Only three days later, this bug was fixed and released with todays updates. Now i can continue top exlpore and test my new system, as i'm still used to openSUSE, but i have to say, that i like the ubuntu expierience very much.

But what about MonkeyWorld 3D? At least i have installed Eclipse on my machine and checked out the latest sources from the repository. There is still a problem with the PDE build, and i wanted to take the chance to fix this. 

There have been some improvements made by Ian (thanks for them), that i don't have seen yet. Outrunner still has a lot of work with his private projects, so there is not much happening. But i plan to create a 4.2.1 release, that at leadt fixes the problem of the missing platform specific SWT jar files. But for that, i have to understand the PDE build. And this is really some tough task. 

I thought i would have understood this thing, but unfortunatly, i was wrong. The build that i have created is still wrong. So, yesterday i was trying to export the mw3d.product with the GUI version of the exporter, but it told me, it can't find the platform specifix jar files, although i have installed the Delta pack. I will digg into this a little bit, and maybe i find a solution for it. 

But if someone from the eclipse project is reading this (i really doubt it), why can't you create a headless build, that is easy to use? Something like that:

eclipse -build <project-file>

That's it for now, back to alpha testing and PDE build...

PS: I made it, not using the command line build, but using the export facility. Maybe now even the command line build works, because there were some platform specific bundles missing. Anyways, i have created a 4.2.1 release that you can download at sourceforge.

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.