Hey!
Our server side programmer jon has decided that his interest lies in other areas of technology and albeit having done a fantastic job on the server so far - the job has now been handed to the fantastic Richard Pilot.
Hey!
So I was developing and have been developing using Eclipse for a long time. However recently the people over at jMonkey released an alpha version of there engine specific tooling - JMonkeyPlatform which is a netbeans based IDE.
It includes several optimised and impressive features such as
-Each day updating to latest engine code
-3D Scene viewer - Model viewer and particle affect manager
Ahh! My head is starting to hurt.
The Physics system inside jME is good - but complicated. Its difficult to solve problems also because there are few people that properly understands the internals and complicated actions which are involved. There are some nasty complications between methods I might call for altering my objects in 3D space - and how those are updated and represented (if at all) in physics space.
Development blog
Development of both client and server components has begun and progresses very well