Out of the bag

Well, the cat is out of the bag on the jME forums, so I might as well post about it on the ol' blog as well. :)

I've been very quiet here lately because I've been traveling a bunch pursuing a few career opportunities. The two major ones were both game-industry related: a job with Three Rings in San Francisco, CA and a job with NCSoft in Austin, TX.

Both places are staffed with smart and friendly guys and both have interesting projects, Three Rings came first and was really tempting, but in the end the expenses of living in SF - plus a chance to continue working with Mark from the jME project - tipped the balance in favor of Austin and NCSoft. (Sorry mdb, but just so you know, it wasn't the breakaway rope that did it -- you guys rock!)

So, I'm likely to continue posting sporadically for the next two months or so but I'm definitely excited to make the career move. More to come while I figure out moving -- again! Ugh.

jME update

On a brighter note than stitches and pain, jME has been moving along well in the last few weeks. The new "Swing as a jME-GL displayed UI" that irrisor has been working on has been refined to work quite well now. As reported earlier here, both shadows and third person controller are in as 1.0 code. (Mark has brow beat me a bit to get me to move on from those two for the time being as I keep finding bits of functionality I want to add... :)

Next and final on the .10 list was improvements to handle BSP and Portals. Out of nowhere though, we were blindsided by a porting of a Quake3 map viewing demo to jME. I say blindsided because the port showed us being 1/2 the speed as xith and even more than that of java3d! That hurt but then again, we knew our regular tech demos were much faster and also that we simply had not worked with a scene like that yet. Mark and I spoke and within 2-3 days I was able to put together a few efficiency gains that got us up above Xith to within the Java3D speeds. Was quite fulfilling to be able to realize a boost like that in such a short time.

I also noted that we use about a third less Java heap memory and that certain areas of the demo map had smooth color shading in jME whereas the other two engines displayed odd flat shading (see shots).

All in all, I'm happy with our results thus far. .10 is probably 1-2 months away, but the above changes should be in cvs by the end of this week.

Now for a few obligatory screenshots (numbers in the upper right of each shot are FPS as reported by Fraps): 

jMonkeyEngine

Java3D

Xith3D

Happy 2006! - here's your hospital bill

Happy New Year to all of you. I've just had probably the most memorable NY eve I'll have for a long time (I hope!) It amounted to sharp pain, four hours in the ER and a couple stitches. You see, I managed to cut about halfway through my thumb, about 1cm from the tip (nail and all) Fortunately I'm right handed and it was my left thumb, but I still get to start off 2006 with a painful thumb... something akin to having a deep paper cut and soaking it in the ocean or a bowl of lemon juice.

Ah well, I guess I could have cut all the way through, right? Teaches me never to volunteer my help with the cooking.