Book Image

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 : Beginner's Guide

Book Image

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 : Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 is a powerful set of free Java libraries that allows you to unlock your imagination, create 3D games and stunning graphics. Using jMonkeyEngine's library of time-tested methods, this book will allow you to unlock its potential and make the creation of beautiful interactive 3D environments a breeze."jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide" teaches aspiring game developers how to build modern 3D games with Java. This primer on 3D programming is packed with best practices, tips and tricks and loads of example code. Progressing from elementary concepts to advanced effects, budding game developers will have their first game up and running by the end of this book.From basic concepts and project creation to building a complex 3D Game, you will learn to layout 3D scenes, make them interactive and add various multi-media effects.You will find answers to common questions including best practices and approaches, how game characters can act and interact, how to simulate solid walls and physical forces, how to take it online to play over a network and much more.From Zero to Hero, start your journey to make your game idea a reality.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

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Now you know how to trigger simple game actions such as rotating a cube. Since the cube is the only object in the scene, the user does not have any choice which spatial to interact with. But as soon as you have several objects in a scene, you need to find out what the user was looking at when he or she pressed an action key.

There are several possible targets of game actions: the target of navigational actions is typically the player character or vehicle—no explicit target selection is necessary. The target of a take action is, in contrast, one of many items lying around. The target of an attack can be a subset of enemy characters, while the target of a magic spell can be pretty much anything, depending on the spell: the player, an ally, an enemy, an item, or even the floor.

These seemingly different game actions are very similar from an implementation point of view: the player selects a target in the 3D scene, and then triggers an action on it. We call the process of...