Ardor3D on OpenSolaris

I noticed earlier today that Sun finally changed the licensing on Darkstar, as per my request. Before going and working on my design, I decided to see what the status of DarkMMO was. Jeff has picked it back up, and has started porting it to Ardor3d.

Ardor3d? I hadn't heard of that...

Apparently, Joshua Slack has moved the development from jMonkeyEngine to Ardor3d. The little bit of research I did seems to indicate that there is a bit of a rift with that -- but that Ardor3d is more current.

Ok, well, can I get Ardor3d working on OpenSolaris?

I go and check out their 'getting started' and was very disappointed to see references to Eclipse. Yes, I know many of you out there like Eclipse; but I am a purist and so have been against it since day 1. Besides, I really didn't like IBM's deceptive practices regarding its launch.

Oh well, let's see if this project is worth using after all. I download the source (subversion, yay!) and go to compile it (maven, yay!)... First failure is obvious... I needed to add a mirror to their nexus repository inside mine.

Try again...

Ok, well now the ardor3d-swt is failing. As much as I hate to, I decide to troubleshoot why it isn't building. As could be expected from a non-java library, the problem was caused by their repo not having the native libraries (yes, native - that's the main reason I despise SWT -- whoever heard of requiring native libraries for a java app intentionally?).

Ok, screw it. I commented out the ardor3d-swt module and then added an exclusion for **/*Swt*.java to the compiler in the top level pom. Ok, now everything else builds.

Now to run the example... hmmm... well that's annoying, I don't really want to have to find all the jars to test it... So I copied the dependency plugin configuration from ambrosia's pom into the top level pom and rebuilt.

Good. Now I have all the runtime dependencies for the examples in one place. I added all of them (why is the Java6 -classpath directory not working?) to the classpath, as well as the auto-generated ardor3d-examples-0.6-SNAPSHOT.jar.

Try again. Close.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/export/home/malachi/work/Ardor3Dv1/ardor3d-lwjgl/lib/lwjgl/native/solaris:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Try again. Ok this time it runs. Can't use JOGL in the popup because there isn't a native library for it. Can't use 8 samples, because then it complains about GLX13 configuration. Can't use fullscreen -- well, that's a bit harsh. I *can* use fullscreen but it looks like crap because it changes to 320x240 and has severe artifacts. However, 4 samples, LWJGL, 1152x864 looks pretty good. Colors look a LOT better on 1024x768 though.

So not sure how much time I will spend on it. Definitely appears that it will be a bit of work to make it usable on OpenSolaris. Then again, maybe I should retry on Windows since my Emotiv Epoc won't run on anything else right now anyways.

BTW: To run the example after setting up the classpath and LD_LIBRARY_PATH...
java com.ardor3d.example.basic.BoxExample