SceneGraph Recommendations

Hi,

I'm looking for a scene-graph library for basic 3d visualization and obj-import/export with jogl-2 as back-end.

I have already taken a closer look at jme, ardor3d, xith3d, aviatrix3d and some more projects.

I could be mistaken but in my humble opinion these projects are too oversized, buggy or abandoned.

I would like to use some ogl 3.3 /4.1 features but I don't need audio, gamepad support or physics simulation.

My real-time 3D graphics experience is rather rusty with simple java3d/jnlp applications dated back to  2009 (where the java world was still in good order(,_,).
 
I would be glad to hear about recommendations or experience reports.

         
 
   

Hi

I advise you to use Ardor3D. I used JMonkeyEngine 2 & 3 in the past too. Aviatrix3D is still maintained but there is only a tiny community around it. Xith3D looks like Java3D but it is still actively maintained. I fixed some bugs in the JOGL-based renderers of Ardor3D and JMonkeyEngine. Ardor3D is the most reliable engine supporting JOGL whereas JMonkeyEngine 3 has a bad non official JOGL renderer supporting JOGL 2.0 (I wrote it but some other guys had introduced new bugs that I did not succeed to fix).

No engine officially supports JOGL 2.0, I'm the only person who can provide you a custom version of Ardor3D supporting JOGL 2.0.

These projects are neither oversized, nor abandoned. JMonkeyEngine 2 & 3 with JOGL are too buggy in my humble opinion.

Java3D was already obsolete in 2009...

Best regards.

Salut Julian,

I was planning of using jogl with jme3. What's bad with the renderer? What's your experience with this library?

thanks,
Carlo

Hi Carlo

I ported the existing JOGL-based renderer of JMonkeyEngine 3.0 from JOGL 1.1.1a to JOGL 2.0. Some months after the start of the project "JMonkeyEngine 3", the JOGL-based renderer was working just fine, I was very happy. Unfortunately, when I tried it several months later, it was no more actively maintained. I ported it to JOGL 2.0 but it was too late, I was alone, some things had been broken and I did not succeed in repairing them.

I have to be more precise. There were problems even on very basic things like windowing. The window was not properly resized, sometimes it was not resized at all (10 * 10 window, unusable). These both JOGL-based renderers are no more an official part of the engine, they are almost no more maintained, nobody uses them. Please stay far from them, I wasted months and several thousands of euros with JMonkeyEngine. The problem is that JOGL had been the "poor parent" of JMonkeyEngine for years before its removal from the official version. JMonkeyEngine 1 had no JOGL support, JMonkeyEngine 2.0 had an extremely buggy renderer not even working with StandardGame before Matthias Henze and I fixed it, JMonkeyEngine 3.0 supports only the competitor of JOGL officially and the biggest users of JOGL in scenegraphs including the guy who wrote the JOGL renderer for JMonkeyEngine 2.0 and I gave up using JMonkeyEngine. Please switch to Ardor3D, it is not that hard, I can help you as I did it in the past.

JMonkeyEngine has a nice game development environment and a quite big community but it is the wrong way to go if you really want to use JOGL.

I actively use Ardor3D, I have worked on my first person shooter since October 2006. I will provide at least an up-to-date JOGL 2.0 renderer for Ardor3D, a straightforward port as I already did in the past and when NEWT works better on Mac OS X, maybe I might provide a better port using NEWT instead of AWT-based GLCanvas.