tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87901832008-07-22T23:48:34.537-05:00Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comBlogger163125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-50226593415119913682008-07-22T21:58:00.004-05:002008-07-22T22:14:46.933-05:00

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

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-42446311130463946942008-07-05T08:56:00.004-05:002008-07-05T09:05:11.638-05:00

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?

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-5039922198226954052008-06-22T15:05:00.005-05:002008-06-22T15:32:03.003-05:00

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

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-2393054121181348122008-06-09T18:50:00.003-05:002008-06-09T18:55:56.951-05:00

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?

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-61846259556803014922008-05-20T21:17:00.004-05:002008-05-20T21:20:28.234-05:00

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!

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-54286871545525438672008-05-15T10:25:00.002-05:002008-05-15T10:35:45.598-05:00

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

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-19525600516339284072008-05-10T17:57:00.002-05:002008-05-10T18:09:16.480-05:00

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.

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-65813656900098630712008-05-10T11:21:00.004-05:002008-05-10T11:43:23.135-05:00

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

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-26635050997897498222008-05-03T19:34:00.002-05:002008-05-03T19:39:23.024-05:00

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,

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-49701374227188141212008-04-27T22:16:00.002-05:002008-04-27T22:18:08.317-05:00

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

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-30952606639337629392008-04-26T08:56:00.002-05:002008-04-26T09:10:42.163-05:00

After spending the better part of three days total gathering, editing and splicing together footage from about a dozen different jME projects, the video portion of movie for our JavaOne presentation is finally done and just waiting for its soundtrack. The quality of some portions is better than others and I'm guessing Rikard and I should stick to our day jobs as a programmer, because we're no

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-60418199631811432292008-04-20T22:24:00.003-05:002008-04-20T22:49:55.430-05:00

So some of you may remember an old comparison test I did a while back where I ran Java3D, Xith3D and jMonkeyEngine all against the same benchmark fly through of a Quake 3 level and recorded memory and frame rate. No? That's ok, it's been awhile and was already a bit hazy to me too. :) The short version is that jME came out ahead by a good margin. Today however I was pointed over to a thread

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-86388070008770532162008-03-08T09:08:00.002-06:002008-03-08T09:29:44.888-06:00

Man, how nice would it be to run jMonkeyEngine apps on your iPhone or iPod? Just Java by itself would be a nice start... something Sun has publicly expressed interest in. Well, as many of you probably know already, Apple announced their iPhone SDK on Thursday. Seeing as how the iPhone has an ARM based CPU that already has Java acceleration support floating around out there, I hoped it would

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-75924428430486782342008-03-03T09:41:00.003-06:002008-03-08T09:30:08.282-06:00

The other day I rediscovered how much multi-sampling improved your average scene for very little cost**. First the pic - look especially around the edges, or click for a magnified view: Multi-sampling is basically rendering the scene at a higher resolution and then downsampling to your screen resolution. It helps reduce "jaggies" on the edges of polygons which gives your scene a much more

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-54765266503059190952008-02-09T08:25:00.000-06:002008-02-09T08:27:02.789-06:00

Sessions are now searchable, see our entry here under session TS-5711. Make sure you add us to your JavaOne schedule. :)

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-79293726897894562302008-02-08T08:32:00.000-06:002008-02-09T08:27:18.852-06:00

Sun recently sent an approval notice for the jMonkeyEngine technical session I submitted late last year. Rikard Herlitz (known to many on the forums as "MrCoder") has graciously agreed to join me in presenting that session. Together, we'll be talking about the process of building a game using the engine technology and Java in general. We'll also have some kind of sample game to use as a

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-54509585158596554222008-01-29T08:36:00.000-06:002008-01-29T10:40:25.030-06:00

Many of you are no doubt familiar with Sun's "Project Wonderland", the "toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds" built on Java 3D technology and Sun's Darkstar server platform. Paul Byrne, of Java3D and Project Looking Glass fame recently announced that Project Wonderland will be making a switch from using Java3D to using jMonkeyEngine. Paul cites the support for features such as

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-70879542055739799832008-01-22T09:21:00.001-06:002008-01-22T09:24:11.828-06:00

Gordon Freeman calls into a radio program... really! Hear it for yourself.

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-40411204123455320932008-01-16T09:07:00.000-06:002008-01-16T09:39:41.494-06:00

An interesting open source game was announced on the jME forums recently. It looks a lot like the old Prince of Persia games from long ago, which is great because I really loved those. Also included is a nice looking editor which looks like an easy way to make custom levels. You can get more information and download the source here.

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-83148802705487092142008-01-11T09:32:00.001-06:002008-01-11T10:50:19.768-06:00

I was having one of those introspective, self-examining moments the other day when I realized something fundamental about why I love computer programming. It is actually something that's been true since I started programming as an eight year old (over twenty years ago now... wow.) I think it is also a trait that has made me a valuable teammate me to some but irritated or turned off others. I

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-85141671004473776142007-12-28T11:37:00.000-06:002007-12-28T11:55:04.922-06:00

Worked on this now for about a day and have things up and running now. One thing I realized as I've been working on this is that the Android version of jME will need to be a little Android specific. For example, OpenGL ES does not support drawing with unsigned integer indices, so all the IndexBuffers had to be changed to ShortBuffers. Ideally the default version of jME would also accept

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-75825149721386009742007-12-27T09:23:00.000-06:002007-12-27T09:40:33.348-06:00

Unfortunately I've been sick this holiday week - lots of coughing, sore throat, etc. - so in between a little bit of gaming and such I've had time to just sit back and code. (Yes, I find it oddly therapeutic.) My choice of projects during my vacation here is an Android port of the jMonkeyEngine. It's certainly been discussed and even poked at a bit by various folks, so I figured putting my two

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-7111816431273893882007-12-25T10:48:00.000-06:002007-12-25T10:53:23.185-06:00

Season's Greetings to all ten of my blog readers. :) I hope you are all enjoying it with family and/or loved ones.

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-6789851009552385122007-12-21T08:54:00.001-06:002007-12-21T09:04:56.885-06:00

The second game mentioned yesterday is called Matics and has a stylish look and physics based game play. From the video and postmortem, the gameplay appears to consist of building contraptions to get your avatar from the start to the end of a level (a la Lemmings.) I've always liked games where you "invent" your way through a puzzle and this looks like it could be a contender for my leisure

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-18684260370676243952007-12-20T08:13:00.000-06:002007-12-21T09:05:15.994-06:00

Two jMonkeyEngine games developed by students at Georgia Tech were shown at the Winter 2007 Demo Day. The first one is called Lord of the Fjords. Described as a "Viking boat bongo battle", the game is a multiplayer boat race using Nintendo's Donkey Konga bongo drums as a control device. You can read more about the project, including a quick postmortem over at the jME forums. The second one

Renansehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com