Ruth Kusterer - jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginners Guide

Ruth Kusterer became intrigued by Java and open source software while completing her degree in computational linguistics. In 2005, she joined Sun Microsystems, Inc. as a technical writer for netbeans.org where she wrote 100 NetBeans IDE Tips & Tricks . Since 2010, she has been working for CA Technologies, Inc. where she's a senior technical writer for security software. In her spare time, she hangs out on jMonkeyEngine.org and strives eternally to write the ultimate Java game.

I would like to thank the jMonkeyEngine core team for answering a BigInteger of newbie questions and helping out with non-trivial code samples. I would also like to thank all the jMonkeys posting inspiring videos of completed games, and a big shout-out to the NetBeans community whose NetBeans platform is the base of the jMonkeyEngine SDK.

Peter Backx is a software developer and architect. He has used Java for more than a decade to shape unique user experiences and build rock-solid scalable software. He received a PhD in Computer Sciences from Ghent University, Belgium. Peter maintains a technical blog at http://www.streamhead.com.

T. Joseph Duchesne holds a Computer Engineering degree from Dalhousie University and works in software-as-a-service web applications, primarily in backend infrastructure using a wide variety of technologies. In his free time, he enjoys video game development and has competed in open source/independent game development competitions.

Joseph is currently Sr. Infrastructure and Software Engineer at SimplyCast (www.simplycast.com), an online software-as-a-service marketing platform.

Jens Hohmuth graduated in Computer Science in 1998 from the University of Applied Sciences of Zwickau, Germany. Jens has been working for more than 10 years as a professional Software Developer. At his day job at a German company, he works for banks and financial services providers applying e-banking solutions on a wide range of different platforms. Jens has expertise in analysis, design, implementation, and support of software projects from small to large scale. He is an gile software development follower and a natural born problem solver.

Jens has outstanding training and presentation skills, and created a popular Intel Protected Mode and MMX Tutorial series as his internship back in college. This tutorial is still one of the top references for Intel Protected Mode today.

At night time, he is a wannabe game developer and the founder of the open source Java GUI Framework "Nifty GUI". Besides "Nifty GUI" he has contributed to many other open source projects. When he's not coding he enjoys creating 2D and 3D art as well as playing his guitar and piano. In the summertime, you can find him outside on his mountain bike (probably with his Macbook Air in the backpack).

I'd like to thank all the jMonkeyEngine core members for being extremely friendly and a great joy to work with. And of course all the "Nifty GUI" users (and critics) in the world for their continuing support.

Dany Rioux received his programmer/analyst diploma more than 15 years ago at the Herzing College in Montreal, Canada.

Although he left the programming side of things for numerous years to work in user support, he has come back to his first love and has been actively working on Disenthral, an RPG space game, based on the jMonkeyEngine3, for the past two years.

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Preface

"You, my brave hero, are about to embark on an adventure full of challenges and risks, but the reward at the end of your journey will be plentiful and will restore peace on earth. Are you ready?"

You have probably played many games before reading this book, and gladly accepted challenges such as this one! Now you will face a new adventure. You will create your own video game. There too will be challenges, but jMonkeyEngine gives you the tools to overcome them. This book introduces Java developers to 3D game development and shows how jMonkeyEngine can make a game developer's life easier.

Note that this book does not cover 3D model or sound design, nor the creative process of coming up with an original game conceptread the appendix for some related resources. By the end of this book, you will be ready to develop a 3D game, and have fun doing it!