OpenMind Java game engine / News: Recent posts

As most of you should know, I have stopped working on the openmind project about a year ago, mostly for personnal reasons, the first being the fall of my motivation.

I have publicly stated I was looking for someone to takeover the openmind project and Tim Orr has positively answered. So he is now a sourceforge Administrator of the project and hopefully should drive new developments.

So far, the projects Tim Orr has been working on with OpenMind have been two-fold. He has a small 2d game, kind of like a metroid clone (still mostly in planning/pre-pre-alpha stage), and a 3d combat simulator based on Battlestar Galactica that has taken him a long time to get going because he switched from C++ OpenGL to GLUT to VB OpenGL to GL4Java, back to C++ OpenGL and finally back to jogl where he's comfortable working. Overall, this experience has given him a good overview of what can be done with 3D technologies based on Java.... read more

There's been quite some time since a release of OpenMind has occured or news have been posted to the Mind2Machine website, and some people may find the project is not advancing as fast they'd like.

Why is this so ? Well first Mind2Machine is a small company made of one person, me. I'm all alone for creating and updating the web site, adding and fixing code to OpenMind, attempting to animate the OpenMind community, filling the administrative papers related to the company, develop and market a plane racing game project on top of the engine and finally sell my skills and do some work that pays so I can live and get some time to work on OpenMind. Then when I get back home I also have to spend the time required by my wife and daughter. So please don't be mad at me if you badly need OpenMind in a reccord time : I'm just doing my best to cope with all this stuff.... read more

The Sourceforge CVS has been updated with a new module named "openmind-jsr" (the jsr stands for JSR-134 which is the name of the specification for the new game core API set released by SUN last month).

This module features :
- full port of OpenMind under JoGL
- Official set of binaries for JoGL and JoAL from java.net
- JoGL binaries available for Win32, MacOSX and Linux
- Home build set of binaries for Jinput, Jutils, dxinput plugin... read more

Dear OpenMind developers,

I have finally suceeded compiling the whole set of JSR-134 APIs after a day of efforts. I'll be porting OpenMind on the JSR-134 next week.

Meanwhile, you may be interested to play with it. You can download it from :
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=72173

It is an exclusive release, as it has not been made available on javagaming.org yet !

Release notes :... read more

Hi everybody,

As some of you may have noticed, Sun has released a set of open source APIs related to javagaming :
- JoGL : an OpenGL Java binding
- JoAL : an OpenAL Java binding
- Jinput : a joystick device API
- Jutils : a set of utilities for the 3 APIs above.

We are quite satisfied with SUNs java gaming politics, and we believe they have made an intelligent choice answering the needs for java gaming by publishing a set of quality open source APIs everyone can contribute to, and eventually fix the bugs met without having to wait six month till an uncertain bug fix.... read more

Dear OpenMind users and developers,

Today, we are proud to bring a new release of OpenMind featuring first MacOSX support. This new release also brings better compatibility with old graphic adapters, and above all features the first release of AL4Java, a Java binding to the OpenAL cross-platform 3D sound library that was brought by Pepijn Van Eeckhoudt.

As usual, OpenMind can be downloaded from http://www.mind2machine.com... read more

Problem with release 0.7.1 :

Though I have done some tests with 0.7.1 release, there is a problem I haven't seen prior the release. The path provided for loading the .ini files with the various samples is wrong. In the constructor of every samples, you have that line :

mainWin = new OmWindow(OmConfig.getOpenMindVersion(), true, 640, 480, true, fullscreen, "data/scenes/fogTest.ini");

You should replace "data/scenes/fogTest.ini" by "samples/fogTest/fogTest.ini", that is the relative directory of the sample where the ini file can be found.... read more

We have released today a new version of OpenMind on the Mind2Machine website :

OpenMind 0.7.1 new features

- CAUTION : Java naming standards package and class renaming : Beware of new naming :
- package names now begin with lowercase
- class names now begin with "Om" prefix rather than "OM" for better readability You will need to adapt your programs to fix the calls to OpenMind classes using the new naming conventions. Hopefully, we are not going to make this kind of structural changes often, but that's part of the problems you have to deal with when working with an alpha release !... read more

Dear OpenMind developers,

There has been quite a lot of changes done on the CVS for the last 3 days, and Ive had a few problems with my CVS setup, thus some of you might have encountered problems while trying to access the CVS. If so, I apologize.

I did the mass renaming of OpenMind classes to fit the java class naming conventions as it was suggested on the forums, and improved the ANT compilation script. These changes mean almost every java source file has changed its name and content, as well as for package directories names, and the whole open mind directory structure. As it is very problematic to restructure a directory tree using the CVS and as Sourceforge doesnt provide us direct access to the file structure, I took the option of creating a new module name openmind0711 featuring the new release of OpenMind alpha 0.7.1. ... read more

2003-03-28 16:30 GMT+2

Dear OpenMind Users and Developers,

OpenMind has been released 10 days ago from now, and there has been 640 downloads (API + SDK) done as today.
3 open source developers have subscribed, and we want to strongly thank them for their participation: Robert Cadena, Tyler Pitchford and Nick Darnell

Robert Cadena is working on setting up the network API. Based on his experience with review of the Quake and Soldier of fortune network source code, he is planning to set up a compact and efficient network layer for OpenMind. Robert has also been revieweing the directory structure of OpenMind and came with some good suggestions for improvements. He is also working on the setup of an ant compilation script which will allow to compile and package OpenMind automatically, much like a makefile, but on a cross-platform basis.... read more

Open Mind is a 3D engine coded mostly in JAVA, but relying on native c++ code for platform specific features such as joystick support, and above all for OpenGL hardware acceleration. Open Mind is mainly attended to be used for games applications. Therefore, every feature in OpenMind is programmed in a way that optimizes and serves best game uses. OpenMind can be run as an application, or as an applet (when the required native libs are installed on the client machine). ... read more

We are done setting-up the task list.
We have attempted to define every task as clearly as possible, and often provided ressource links on the internet so developpers can quickly figure out what kind of work will be necessary before deciding if they engage. This should help structure the project and get better development coherency.

The task list provides a wide choice of works, from easy to hard programming tasks, so every programmer interested in helping OpenMind development should find something apropriate for him.

We are currently working on the setup of the sourceforge website in order to make a quality launch, with a stable release of OpenMind, a good basic documentation, a clear tasklist, and a good web site. This requires a lot of time (even being almost full time on it), so we expect it will require us the whole february month to set all this up. OpenMind is already existing and represents 8 monthes of full time coding, so be patient and you'll see when it'll be launched it's been worth the wait.... read more