In the last several months I have managed to pull some of the team back with JOGL promises. So we are developing JOGL/any OpenGL wrappers based game technology (and game). During the transition though, we are developing a limited Java3D scene graph renderer, so we are still connected to J3D for the near term, but before the end of the year will be complete off and have no plans to look back.
Although I would be interested in what happens to J3D particularly a 1.4 release, I would prefer ALL Suns 3D efforts go towards OpenGL support just so we have the best possible foundation, and end duplicate projects like JOGL and Sun/SGI's Java wrappers for OpenGL. In addition, I would like to see Java/OpenGL support in other environments, i.e. handhelds and in my dreams even a hack Java/near-OpenGL type layers on future consoles.
Open sourcing Java3D would be nice WITH heavy documentation but only for reference into some of the mechanisms in the system. I say heavy documentation because if I want to see how something was done the J3D way, I can just decompile, so only the added docs would be more useful.
In the money to burn file, I can dream of Java3D staying alive but shifting to an open OpenGL layer (a'la Performer, Open Scene Graph, etc.) so we can use it's features or not as we see fit on a per project basis. But I'm not counting on this one.
And finally a formal press release style announcement of what Sun is doing explaining there focused commitment to OpenGL wrappers.
Pesonal take...
Unfortunately, I think that the Java3D brand is ruined and should be completely abandoned if some sort of graph layer is going to be continued. At least in game development circles, I get laughed out of the room if I mention Java3D now, whether it's deserved or not, the preception is it's crap now. I could list 10 things that are great about it (clean multitexture support) and 10 that are terrible (less portable than C/C++ graph APIs. i.e. no Mac). All in all it did a good job. If it could've evolved a bit faster it would have been better, but in the end I really believe the "black-box" design is what killed it for gaming, and of course it never really was designed for that space anyway, so it was a bad fit (but all we had).
I could go on, but I feel like I am giving a eulogy. "He was a great friend, and we will all mourn the loss, but he is in a better place now and we must go on"
-- "It is ridiculous to claim that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the eighties, we should by now have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and pop pills while listening to monotonous electronic music.." - anon
Justin Couch wrote:
As many of you know, I've been involved with Java3D for a very long period of time. This has given me, and consequently my company (we' a small contracting shop) access to many different people within Sun. Right now, we find ourselves in an interesting position with regards to the whole Java and 3D graphics community. There will be more announcements and so forth over the next week or two, but now I have a specific request of the Java3D community to provide us with feedback, that we can then pass on, and hopefully help make a difference.
Let's start with the assumption that Sun is no longer, and will never be supporting Java3D. There is a body of code lying dormant inside Sun. Now, look to the future.
What I am seeking is as many responses as possible from everyone here, either private or public about what your future holds either definitely or as a wish list, with respect to Java3D. Both positive and negative comments are encouraged. I specifically looking for answers on what you would prefer to happen. Here are some different responses that I'm thinking people could give:
- Java3D is not useful in any way to my projects. I've left it for something else (eg Xith3D or LWJGL because you are gaming oriented). Better off to leave it to wither on the vine.
- It's a good thing and I use it in many of my projects. If someone was out there actively supporting it, we would continue to use it. I don't really care what the codebase is doing, so long as it is actively being developed.
- Chunks of Java3D are of particular interest to me. It would be really good if I could have parts X, Y and Z were released as open source.
- I'd like Java3D to be completely open sourced so that I can take it and support/develop it myself. I'm not really interested in long term someone else support, but with the source code available, my own projects can continue to move forward.
- I'd like Java3D to be completely open sourced, but really I want someone to be a steward of the codebase to make sure that there is a central "reference" implementation to work with. Alternatively, we could pay someone else to do the maintenance on it. I'd like to recommend that you consider ABC Company/Consortium be given the code to work with.
- If I had access to the source, I'd like to help develop it further along the direction of product market LMN (eg CAD-specific or SciViz).
- It's of mild interest to me. I was planning on moving off it, but if it was open sourced, then we would hang around and continue to use it.
- Having the code there as a reference would be really useful to me. I already have plans to build my own scene graph/rendering engine, and don't really plan to use Java3D code directly, but knowing some of the design decisions would be really handy.
I'd appreciate it if in your response you could give some small background of the type of projects you are using it for. For example - a university, so it is being used as a teach tool or visualisation engine for experimentation.
Note that myself and Yumetech are not wanting to use this information to market to you or anything like that. We're in a position to provide a case to Sun about what to do with their code. We're basically going to package up the replies, put a summary on it about the general mood expressed and then chat about the results with the appropriate people in Sun. Sun is a big an varied company, with not all parts marching to the same tune. They're interesting in working out what the current business cases are surrounding Java3D. They are certainly not even remotely considering Sun putting any engineering resources into continuing Java3D development, but they are looking at whether it is worthwhile helping others to do so. We're certainly not looking for a specific response like "please open source it" - if the majority of people really couldn't care less about Java3D, then we'll pass that along too.
Please feel free to pass this message along to anyone that you feel may want to respond - particularly if you know of people that have already moved away from Java3D and are no longer on this list. I'll be posting this to the javagaming site later this evening.
-- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant -------------------------------------------------------------------
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