Last few weeks I've been pretty much heads down working on a new Ardor3D based UI system (to be included as part of the public Ardor3d.) If you'll remember, I've posted here before about doing UI work for another company. That UI system was heavily inspired by FengGUI, Swing and WoW's UI system. I spent enough time going in that direction back then that I felt most productive going a similar direction this time.

After spending a bit more than a month so far on this, I'm happy to say things are coming along nicely and it's pretty close to something I'm comfortable releasing to testers. What it's missing mostly is skinning and scripting support... two things I expect to add over the coming months - skinnning first, because the UI is pretty ugly right now!

One of the first things I've put together is a rewrite of Ardor3d's bubblemark example as a ui frame - using label icons as the balls. You can see a shot of that below (yes, it's blocky and a bit ugly without a nice skin.)



In the top left is a FPS counter using a simple BMText object. There's also a secondary frame to the right that will allow you to set some properties. Right now there's only two toggle buttons there, but that will expand as I get more time.

Watch for all of this to hit svn in a week or so.

Wednesday's JavaOne has been interesting. There's been some interesting talks and I've been able to see old friends. I've also had an opportunity to meet with lots of cool people and spread the word about Ardor3D.

One common thread I've noticed while talking to folks here is that there is a definitely a hunger for a product in Ardor3d's niche but with the editor simplicity of a Unity or platform integration of an XNA. This has long been a desire of mine as well, and some of the impetus behind the start of Ardor3D. I think now with technologies offered in newer Java releases and the possibility of the recently unveiled Java Store, this dream is closer to a viable reality (either for myself or someone else in the Java gaming community.) The last missing piece of the puzzle really is proper funding to make it happen. Only so much can be done out of love when it is a task secondary to feeding your family.

Semi related to the above I guess is a recently published JavaOne Rock Star interview, which I think makes me sound more impressive then the reality. :) As usual, I'm sure I was not clear on a few things, like when I said 6u10 not available on the Mac, I was referring to the newer Java browser plugin and similar sorts of improved consumer experiences. I'm told by folks here that this "is coming" though so we'll see...

So, if you follow my blog you probably remember that I said I would not be at JavaOne this year... But if you follow my twitter feed you'll already know that at the last minute I had an opportunity to go that I could not refuse. So, here I am at Moscone once again.

This year, thankfully, I am doing nothing remotely stressful and can actually just enjoy the show. Oddly enough, I find it a bit hard to do so -- I'm just not that used to "attending" one of these things I guess. :)

Yesterday I dropped in on a talk by Doug Twilleager on MTGame, a "veneer" if you will that Wonderland has placed between them and jME adding some features such as better multiprocessor support, abstraction for collision and picking models, an object model and a few other odds and ends. The talk went smoothly and was interesting, but I actually found the questions at the end to be the best part. After all these years of trying to get the word out about Java, games, and performance, several questions were still along the lines of "Don't you take a big hit by not being in pure C++?!?" Doug even showed a simple demo of 200 teapots spinning at 100FPS and some in the crowd had trouble grasping that this is all client side, no tricks, and yes that's really the framerate. (And honestly, it would have been a dismal frame rate if that were the point of that particular demo - which it wasn't.)

I guess even among Java developers there is a very long road to understanding here. Ah well.

MTGame itself was interesting; I like some of the concepts (perhaps not their specific implementation in mtgame) such as the process/processor model. I think a similar system could make a good replacement for the jme-inherited game tasks and the task queue. I wish that they had worked a little closer with the community instead of waxing over the areas they did not like... but then again, in my experience that seems to be the norm in these situations. (And helping to build Ardor3D could make me part of that crowd I suppose :)