MonkeyEngine SDK 3.1 Alpha1 has been released - iOS, FBX, VR and more

[erlend_sh]

Original announcement on jmonkeyengine.org



This release has been years in the making -- something we're determined to change going forward. That being said, it was with good reason that we took our sweet time, because "3.1" could just as well have been called "4.0". Now for some highlights:

All development is now on GitHub

jME has been developed on GitHub for a long time now, but the canonical 3.0 release was still located on the trusty but rusty GoogleCode. No more.

From ANT to Gradle

This won't make a difference to most end-users, but it certainly make things easier for us, and it opens up doors for Maven users as well.

Lots of goodies

More details in the announcement post, but in short:

• Unified Renderer Architecture
• OpenGL 3 Core Profile Support
• Geometry / Tesselation Shader Support
• Scene Graph Optimizations
• Single pass lighting
• FBX Importer (Beta!)
• Geometry Instancing
• Rewritten Audio Streaming
• Networking Improvements
• Gamma-correct lighting and high dynamic range rendering
• Profiling Frame Times
• Big iOS Improvements
• Android Bugfixes & Improvements
• Blender Importer improvements
• SDK Editor Improvements (new optional jME skin!)
• Bullet Physics improvements
• And a bunch of bugfixes of course.

Virtual Reality is being worked on in a separate project at the moment.

Also, those who've been following our advances on Physically Based Rendering should know that this particular nugget isn't due until 3.2, but the gap between feature-releases shouldn't be nearly as large this time.

We be rollin' now.