The latest

It's been pretty slow on my blog lately, and mostly that's because life has been very busy here. I've started a new corporation called Ardor Labs (site not up yet), which will be mainly focusing on 3d Java technology. I've already got a good amount of work coming in and have started learning new areas of technology in the process; namely, the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and for another project, Project Darkstar. The later has come a long way since I last saw it two years ago and I'm happy to report it can be very performant. I say "can be" mostly because you have to get your mind focused on doing things in such a way as to properly use the technology and that took a little bit of doing for a client side guy like me. :) More on that another time.

I'm also excited that jME development is moving forward again. Recently added to jME 2.0 was JOGL support (by a very dedicated guy named Steve Vaughan who has also been helping with build and source cleanup.) Also recently added was SWT canvas support and support for Fog coordinates (fog being initiated by Kevin Glass.) The fog coordinate support will be interesting for lots of things, one example being fog of war.

A number of others have been very busy in the community and I will try to comment more on that. It's a good time to be a code monkey. :)

Like a Rock Star!

Evidently enough attendees thought we did a good job at our JavaOne '08 tech session to push Rikard and I to Rock Star status.

Don't worry, we won't let it go to our heads... Now where did I put my cape?

Changes and reflections

Recently our small group at NCsoft went through a few changes, spreading us all out to other projects and teams. I think, knowing as much of the back story as I do, that this is a really good thing for the company and even the technology we are working on as well. I believe this will help pollinate many new and interesting game concepts and possibilities, especially in a company so well known for taking risks and trying new things.

That said, it was also a good time for me to step back and evaluate my own personal goals and life and see what I would really like to do next. There were great opportunities to be had at NCsoft to be sure, especially given my intuition about the future of the company as mentioned above. But finally I chose instead to take a break and perhaps get back to contracting for a while. It was a hard decision to leave full time employment, especially with this company. In the end though I really felt that stress and health and various other factors had built up far too high in my life. Things had progressed to the point where my creativity and energy were not at the levels I needed them at if I was going to progress towards those life goals.

What does this mean? Time will tell of course, but I plan to remain active in jME, perhaps even more so now (I may end up having tons of free time... yikes!) But also it hopefully means a nice one or two week vacation sometime soon.

Thank you NCsoft for believing in Java technology and for 2+ great years! It has been an amazing place and I will miss especially the very talented people I was fortunate enough to work with.

Life limps along... again

I find it depressing how cyclical life can be. You're up trying your best, enjoying the view... Then you do something stupid and crash back to the earth. It takes time to pick yourself up again, but I suppose eventually you do and you get to face hope again (only to know that the wheel will turn and you'll be back down again later.) Is it fate that turns the wheel? Human nature? Karma?

Back to the grind.

Article in Massively

Saw this post about our tech session on massively.com this morning. I certainly don't recall hinting about anything NCsoft was doing aside from saying I wish I could tell more about what the team I was on was doing, (but then joked that I couldn't for fear of the lawyers.) Ah well!

More from JavaOne

During our technical session at JavaOne, Rikard and I showed off two videos and two live demos. You've seen the first video already. The second video was a timelapse demonstration of the kind of tool you can build in Java using the jMonkeyEngine, using the NCsoft world-building tool as an example. We received permission to upload that video to YouTube yesterday, which is exciting because it's one of the first real work-related thing we've been able to get out into the public.

You can watch Rikard show off his brilliant skills as a worldbuilder here:

Lunch with James

During the rehearsal for Friday's keynote I was fortunate enough to sit at lunch during the break with James Gosling and Chris Melissinos. We all talked entertainment, games, kids, and yes some jMonkeyEngine. It was certainly fun times and a neat peak into the brain of someone I respect a lot.

Over now

Yeah, it's over now (but I can breath somehow. :)

JavaOne 2008 is over and done with and I'm still standing - despite doing a technical session, a BoF (basically an experts panel,) a broadcast interview and getting onstage for the Friday keynote. I definitely have to thank the guys at Sun who helped make all that possible and really enabled jMonkeyEngine to get into the public eye more than ever. It was very exciting to hear the amount of buzz about jME and Java gaming in general. It was also awesome to finally meet several people I look up to in the industry such as Ken Russel, Sven Goethel, Doug Twilleager, Paul Byrne, and of course James Gosling (and many others, sorry I'm still tired.) Special props to Chris Mellisinos who actually does so much more behind the scenes in getting the various factions to support the idea of Java as a gaming platform than most of you realize.

Once I have had time to recuperate a bit I'll try to write more, but for now, check out the following videos:

1. The jMonkeyEngine 2008 reel
2. My interview with Chris Mellisinos
3. The JavaOne keynote I took part in. (I've got about 8 mins of time on stage starting at 36:20)

Nervousness ensues

Well, JavaOne is fast approaching and it looks like I've got a full plate ahead of me. Rikard and I finished off the last of our demonstration pieces for our technical session this morning, so we're pretty much all ready to go. Yet, somehow my stomach and nerves feel like they are being dipped into alternating pots of ice cold and boiling hot water. Why am I speaking again? I'm a programmer, not a public speaker. :)

Ah well, I'm sure it will go just fine and the week will be past and gone before you know it. Still... excuse me while I go scream.

jME 2.0 alpha source code released

From the posting I made over at the forums:

Here's what has made it in so far: (this list may not be all encompassing.)

* The batch classes and SceneElement have been rolled back out.
* We now use Enumerations pretty much everywhere in the API, making it a lot easier to figure out what values you have available. I've tried to comment all the tricky ones. We'll of course have more documentation to add, and I'm sure more Enums as well.
* 40+ new Image types supported, We now have support for all OpenGL1.1 image formats, as well as float formats (not tested though).
* We have 3 new mirror texture wrap types and now support specifying wrap on the R axis.
* We now support 1D, 3D and CubeMap textures.
* We now support 2 new Environmental map modes (NormalMap and ReflectionMap)
* 2 sided stencil support and stencil wrapping
* Lots more control over blending (including use of glBlendColor, glBlendEquation, glBlendEquationSeparate and glBlendFuncSeparate)
* New particle features: Timelines and animated textures. (With updated support in my editor)
* Some updated support for Collada, specifically we now have support for library_nodes, which is especially useful for loading in sketchup models. (Still not perfect, of course)
* Simple Bone and animation blending support. (Mostly this was checked in to keep us from having to maintain two versions of jME at work, I'd love to see the whole Bone and Skinning upgraded by a clever user or dev... hint hint.)
* New stats system... Instead of the old fps bar at the bottom, we now have a nice charting package. It's customizable, and you can turn off stats collecting at run time.
* Lots of small bug fixes and changes over the last 6 months that I can't remember...

Check it out from our svn repo.