Spent a long evening last night reworking the shadow mapping stuff from Salvage Rights into a reusable pass for JME. Few things needed to happen

- Tidy up the code, a bit of a mess initially
- Switch from perspective mapping to parralel for direction light sources (the only ones I use)
- Make everything configurable
- Integrate the shadow mapping extension access in JME.

Didn't get the last one done. At the moment the pass still has a few lines of direct OpenGL access in the middle of it. I'd rather these were replaced with some JME functionality, right now it's bound to LWJGL rendering. The rest is done but the pass still isn't really finished. It needs:

- Support for multiple light sources in one pass (multitexturing?)
- Automatic determination of view focus via the frustum centroid. Still got no idea what that last sentence means.

I'd also like to add cascading shadow maps at some point to get the resolution up. Anyway, here it is:

I opened a forum post over at JME to try and get the community to help me fix it up to be good enough for everyone. Have to wait and see what happens.

As always, I want to use the code (thats why I wrote it :)). The nice bit was making the pass generic and fixing it up a bit actually gave Salvage Rights a bit of speed boost. More importantly the shadow resolution looks fine with only a 512x512 shadow map now which is really awesome :)

Here's another good looking JME project in progress, Ferrari 3D by Dennis Bijlsma. It appears to be a stock racing game but shows off JME quite nicely. It also has a great debug modes which hint at how the game works - cool. More details over on the JME Thread.

License: Freeware?
Developer: Dennis Bijlsma
Status: In Development

As some readers may know, I'm very interested in JME at the moment. One of the most exciting projects going on over there at the moment is the JClassic RPG. While using the powerful JME this RPG is desinged in a very retro style, using a similar approach to Bard's Tale, or Dungeon Keeper. It's a really novel approach to be mixing the new technology with the old school approach. Kudos. The videos on their blog look great, can't wait to find time to try it out - open source too!

License: Freeware?
Developer: Paul Illes
Status: In Development

Kine over on the JME Forums is working on a stunning looking racing game named Bolidz. Extremely abstract looking backdrops look like it they add to the feeling of speed. It appears to be quite early in development but I can't wait to see where this one goes.

License: Unknown
Developer: Kine
Status: Work In Progress

HHexen is a work in progress over on the JMonkey Forums. The author describes it as "a little game to mess around and kill some bad guys" which sounds just about perfect to me. The procedural dungeon generation looks particularly interesting. Note that although the game looks like Hexen/Heretic it's not intended as remake.

License: Unknown
Developer: HamsterOfDeath
Status: Work In Progress