donotturnoff

Introduction

While building the JThree rendering engine, I needed a program to implement it so I could test the features I was putting in. This started out as a just a program with which I could draw lines and shapes onto a canvas, but as I started adding things like handling user interaction with objects and textures, it developed into this sanbox program.

This program will end up running quite slow when you place a few hundred blocks, but bear in mind that it wasn't meant to be a full game - it grew organically as a testing program for JThree, which in itself isn't particularly fast as rendering engines go, because it was my first real attempt at 3D rendering and I had a limited time frame to work in. It was a piece of coursework for A-level, and while the code on its own would have been manageable within the 6 months or so that we had to do it, I also produced a 600-page report, studied for four A-levels, and did a lot of other stuff, so I couldn't spend too long on optimising it.

To run, download JThreeDemo.jar and textures.zip to the same directory and extract the textures to that directory too, then simply open the JAR file. The textures are separate so you can edit them.

Files

• JThreeDemo JAR file
• Textures zip file

Screenshots

Some blocks

Related projects

• JThree
• Lorenz

To do

As JThree is not really suited to doing complex projects, I don't think I'm really going to add much more to this program. In the future, I plan to make another rendering engine, but without the time constraints and with the benefit of previous experience, and I may well make a new version of this using that rendering engine.