Today I started on my summer research project in making Wind Explorer in a 3D environment, for which I am using the jMonkeyEgine. So far I am liking this engine, along with its website and tutorials. To compare against, I have used the Unity game engine before as well as some direct X experience.
Today I got through the first 6 tutorials, finishing almost all of the exercise in each tutorial. Although I did things a little differently after the 3rd tutorial, as I kept on with the same project from then on and just added each tutorial's aspect to my project, instead of creating a new project and copy-pasting the sample code like the tutorials want. This was I got more hands on with the code and ended up with a much bigger, cooler, project.
One difference between Unity and jMonkeyEngine that I like so far is that jMonkeyEngine uses a tree structure for object handling. What this allows for is mass changes of grouped objects. For example, if you have all the trees in a level under a parent tree node, if you change the rotation of that parent node then all the children will also rotate. Also, the location of the parent node acts like the origin of the children node, which might be a very useful feature.
Edit: Here is a good visual representation of this tree structure:
Link
That's if for today, tomorrow I plan on finishing up the tutorials, or at least come as close as I can.
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