The jME Wiki Guide

This guide provides a general overview of the jME Wiki and information about how to contribute. If you are just interested in getting started coding with jME then you only need to read the first section which will help you to navigate around this Wiki. However if you wish to contribute or have never heard of a Wiki before then the rest of this guide is worth reading.

One important point to make is that the Wiki is kept up to date with the latest code from CVS (or nightly builds) so if you are using one of the official release builds then some of the code presented may not work! So if you are using an official release build and you find some code that doesn't work feel free to post in the jME forum.

This Wiki Documentation for the jME API is community-driven: Anyone is allowed to contribute, but please keep entries professional. Moderation will be used to remove entries deemed inappropriate.

The Wiki is divided into several sections, each providing different forms of help and information.

The User's Guide can be considered the official jME documentation. As such it provides a more technical overview of each jME feature. The user's guide is a great place to go when you need to learn how to use a feature you have never used before. However it generally doesn't provide much information about using multiple features together to create a real world game. For that information you'll want to check out The Tutorials.

The FAQ contains a list of frequently asked questions. The list is compiled from questions that get asked multiple times in the jME Forum, in the hopes of speeding up future jME user's knowledge gain. This is the section to read if you are new to jME or are having a problem that isn't specific to your jME application (for example, getting jME to run correctly).

The Terms List contains a list of terms used through out the Wiki. If you see a word you don't understand then check out this section for an explanation.

The Tutorials section is similar to the User's Guide but its contents are more geared towards using multiple jME features together to produce 'real world' effects. This is the section to read once you have some of the basics of jME development learned and want to start moving towards a more complete application. Most tutorials follow the structure of providing sample code and then explaining how said code creates the desired effect the tutorial is about.

The Articles contains articles that are not necessarily directly related to jME but may be related to game development in general. These are generally more journal like articles that may not contain any code samples.

Code Snippets are just that, small sections of code that can be used by anyone to provide something useful. The code snippet section could be thought of as a more advanced version of The Tutorials as code in this section comes with basic usage instructions and not detailed explanations of how the code achieves its effect.

Anyone and everyone is free to contribute to the jME Wiki, this section of this guide provides information about how to go about contributing. If you would like more information about Wikis in general then click here to read Wikipedias article all about Wikis.

The most important point to make about the jME Wiki is this:

No jME Wiki page is sacred!

This means regardless of what page you are reading or who created it initially, if you spot a mistake or can add more information you are free to update the page. There are of course a few guidelines you should follow if you don't want your update to be reverted (see the Guidelines section below).

To start contributing you need to be logged in, unfortunately the Wiki doesn't share its credentials with the jME forum. This means you will need to create a new account before you can log in.

To log in or create an account click the ”Login” button at the footer of the page, this will take you to another page where you can input your username/password to login or follow another link to register.

To update a page you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to update and click the “Edit this page” button, which is on both the header and footer on the left hand side.

To create a new page all you have to do is edit an existing page to include an internal link to a page with the unique title you wish your page to have. Then if you click on the link inserted into the existing page you will be taken to a page that says:

This topic does not exist yet

You’ve followed a link to a topic that doesn’t exist yet. If permissions allow, you may create it by using the Create this page button.

You can now create your new page by clicking on the “Create this page” button which is situated in the same place as the “Edit this page” button.

This sections contains some basic guidelines that all Wiki pages should follow:

• All Wiki pages should be in English
• No inappropriate language will be tolerated
• All Wiki pages should be relevant to jME or about general game/engine design.
• The User's Guide should be of a more professional/technical standard (for example, not including personal preferences)