First steps in 3D - JME plus Blender

Tonight I had some free time to setup the very basics of a 3D development environment. Emerged Blender to my gentoo linux box and after a little copy that here and this there I could export to JME (JMonkeyEngine) accepted 3D model format.

Meanwhile the project got its first source files and a project hierarchy too (org.jcrpg.apps.Jcrpg is the first class!). JME libraries put into place I was ready to put together my first experiment with model loading under the engine. A simple cube, that's all for today, but lit and seen from all around thanks to JME's easy to start-out abstract classes. Now I highly hope I can handle the difficulties of getting used to the new engine. Still it's obvious, this is a bigger task with a lot of experimenting still ahead.

Just mentioning that I put together the very first view of total system architecture - level 0, version around -0.99, just to have a scheme to start debating myself...and possibly others if my thoughts are crystallized enough for that.

Developer blog launched

This is the day to start it all out. A happy beginning expected to be with a happy ending in the midterm future (or never).

After some hours of investigation, and long past dead and short experiments in RPG (Role Playing Game) game development (some stone dead Pascal projects with remnants in a dark and webbed corner of a hard disc), it has turned out to be a good idea to get serious in fun! Yes, now it seems quite possible to develop a nice RPG framework in Java after finding out that we have a cool Java OpenGL engine called JMonkeyEngine and to turn into reality my old dream: to create a nice enchanting old-fashioned pen and paper & turn based game with a decent story and a huge place to play. Now these are all goals to reach with hard work and a lot of time. Good Luck for the project!

Many things to do and invent and think through... how can we create a nice and simple engine goodly parted into appropriate little pieces of Java modules? What do we really want to do with those modules, how to make them interact? What innovations to include? What should the graphics look like?

Now before answering these questions in later posts maybe, just imagine that the result game should be somewhere around the famous Wizardry 7 crpg, if it doesn't ring a bell, imagine Eye Of The Beholder. My picture of the new game deviates not too much from these concepts, yet of course it will differ in a lot of ways, taking into consideration that we have the power of many GHzs, shiny new 3D opengl video cards and the Java programming language and its tools. As of the programming part also a frameworkish something must be created for simplicity to develop the game. The license question is still an open thing, but expect something open-sourceish. So the framework, a living world, the graphical system, the way a quest can be put into the machine, and the license are now to think about... and many more.

Anyway, the project is departing today from one harbor of reality to a far and distant harbor of imagination and dreams. Keep on floating...