jMonkeyEngine Software Development Kit (SDK)

Welcome to the repository of the jMonkeyEngine Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK simplifies developing 3D Applications with the jMonkeyEngine. It contains everything ever needed to develop a full application.

Our SDK (or jmonkeyplatform) is based on the Netbeans IDE but includes additional features like:

• A Scene Editor (SceneExplorer: Preview your scene, adjust all positions, add Controls and AppStates (WYSIWYG) and then just save the scene)

• A Material Editor

• A Filter Editor (combine multiple filters and just load them in-game)

• Bundled JDK for each platform (so you don't need to install java first)

• Bundled Blender (so you can start 3d modelling and also use it's import capabilities) and many more!

It is important to know that the SDK is not coupled with the engine itself, so if you have issues which are unrelated to the IDE, report them here. This however also means, that the SDK can have a different pace than the engine (at the time of writing, the SDK is on 3.1.0-stable whereas the engine team is already working on 3.2) but you can nonetheless work on a different engine version than the one which is bundled.

!!! Note: You are currently watching the master branch which is the active development for JMonkeyEngine 3.2. For the current release candidate, see the v3.1 branch! !!!

Getting Started / Downloading the SDK

Just have a look at our releases section. There you can download the version you desire. The SDK will generally follow the convention that it's version number is lined up with the matching engine version plus some suffixes for different SDK releases on the same engine version.

There are multiple files from which you can choose:
You can take the platform agnostic jmonkeyplatform.zip which contains the full SDK able to be run on "any" (X86/x86_64) platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) however it lacks the jdk as well as blender.
Thus the prefered download is jmonkeyplatform-windows-x64.exe which essentially is jmonkeyplatform.zip and the correct version of the JDK and Blender (hence the ~250MiB size increase).
If you don't know whether your system is 64 bits (x64) or 32 bits (x86), you can type uname -i on Linux or look into the system informations (right click on Computer->Properties) on Windows.

Note: The Tag stable is refering to 3.0-stable, which is an ancient version. You should not start any new projects based of 3.0 but use 3.1 instead. Also the tag is pointing to the wrong commit since we had to re-upload those files but the repo doesn't really contain any 3.0 commits anymore.

Building the SDK

Building the SDK is an easy process basically, but it depends on what kind of distribution you want to build. You also have to know that the build process changes from time to time, so have a look at the .travis.yml file, or related, you will see how we build our releases then.

Note: Currently, the SDK has to build the engine on it's own, because not all needed dependencies are in mavenCentral/jCenter. Thus you have to call build_engine.sh first on a Linux System, Inside your Windows-Git-Shell or you can manually checkout the jMonkeyEngine repository and then invoke gradlew.bat -PbuildJavaDoc=true install. This will add all jMonkeyEngine Libraries into your local maven "server".

Technically the gradle task buildSdk is the main task which builds the sdk (Invoking ./gradlew buildSdk or gradlew.bat buildSdk on Windows).

If you just want to run the SDK on your machine:
call ./gradlew run (gradlew.bat run), which internally calls buildSdk and then uses ant to run the SDK.

If you want to build the platform agnostic zip:
call ./gradlew buildSdk and then you have the file in dist/jmonkeyplatform.zip

If you want to build the platform installers (like we do):
call ./download-jdks.sh, ./gradlew buildSdk and then ant build-installers You have to install ant for this to work (for linux consult the internet, for mac os look into homebrew). Note that this takes a long time (more than one hour), because a huge amount of data is compressed and such.

If you want to build the platform installers (On Windows -> without having ant):
See above. You can bypass ant by declaring a gradle task, just like it has been done for run. There, the gradle included ant will be used). Alternatively you can launch netbeans in netbeans/, open the SDK as Netbeans Project Collection and select package as: . Note that you still have to download and unpack the jdks somehow, which is a cumbersome process, which is why it is discouraged to build the installers on Windows (Linux and Mac OS are supported).

If you want to debug the SDK inside an IDE:
See above. You want to open the SDK as Netbeans Project from within Netbeans (you can use the nb in netbeans/) and you can then treat it as regular project with the difference that there are several subproject.

A note about the netbeans/ folder: To save bandwidth buildSdk downloads netbeans once to said folder and uses it over and over again. Even when the download URL is changed (i.e. when you update the netbeans version), you have to delete the netbeans folder and remove it from any cache (Travis!), so it can be reloaded.

Developing/Contributing

First of all, I suggest you to take a look at docs/. Those docs are a loose collection of things I came across during development, but they prevent you from re-doing the same experiences. Other than that, Netbeans Platform is your google keyword for any NB related issues. Basically the only tricky thing is how we handle custom entries in the SceneExplorer. This is called the Netbeans Nodes API and is somewhat unintuitive. Just take a look at the Motion Event Pull Request, which should've been added around March 2016, there you can see what was needed to add MotionEvents to the SDK.

Other than that, we are more than happy to help, even if your addition is incomplete. Make sure you use the Netbeans formatting, obvious variable naming and commented and especially documented code, though. Before you open an issue, make sure that it is not an engine bug, but a real sdk bug. If you are uncertain whether it is a real bug or misuse, you can either open an issue or ask on the hub using the Troubleshooting | jmonkeyplatform category.

Issues when building

Could not find jme3.1.0-stable :
When you occur this issue, you have to go back to the engine build step and see how the engine is called. Technically the engine version is collected out from git tags, or called SNAPSHOT. Then there are cases where this recognition fails. For example when the SDK has a tag but the engine is snapshot. Then take a look at build.gradle in the sdk repo. It contains a field called ext.jmeVersion or something, where you can specify the version.

Could not find jme3-jbullet :
jBullet is not part of jCenter, which means you forgot to build the engine first. See above.