Dos this change your mind?

I was hoping the answer would be that clear, hahah. Anyway, the texture was being exposed to light but no light was affecting it for some reason. I created a light just for the plane it solved it. Now I'm running into a very weird problem. I'm writing a starship fighting game and originally I tested it with a single enemy ship. I have since changed the single variable to an array of a class names Enemy which holds both the Object3D and handles the ship's behavior (processed in the game loop). It worked fine for a single ship. The odd thing is that now that I have an array of ships (initialized really early on in the constructor), some of the collision tests are still being called for index 0 only (as opposed to a loop testing all the ships) and I'm getting not a NullPointerException but an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException on collision(CollisionEvent) when I try to shoot at the ship (or when it's time for it to turn because it hit the sky).

On run():
      if (!enemies[0].turning)
enemies[0].tieGuide.checkForCollisionSpherical(enemies[0].translation, 800f);
      if (enemies[0].turning)
enemies[0].turnAround();
      else enemies[0].perform();
On collision(CollisionEvent):
if (!enemies[0].turning && e.getSource() == enemies[0].tieGuide && e.getTargets()[0]==worldSphere && System.currentTimeMillis() > enemies[0].lastTurn+1000)
      enemies[0].turnAround();

I used a billboarded plane instead, and I wrote a quick GifTexture class that switches the Texture instance of the object when a next frame method is called. All the Texture instances are pre-initialized and added to the TextureManager, but the plane, most of the time, is rendered without any texture because I don't think jPCT updates the texture references on the fly. Is there an Object3D.update method I'm missing (I've even tried rebuild())? If not, how could I go about doing that (replacing the texture on the fly)?

And the Overlay itself doesn't show. The first lines are how I initialized the Overlay, the second are in my collision(CollisionEvent) method.

explosionPlane = new Overlay(theWorld, buffer, "explosion2.gif");
explosionPlane.setVisibility(false);

explosionPlane.setSourceCoordinates((int)point.x-explosion.getWidth()/2, (int)point.y-explosion.getHeight()/2, (int)(point.x+explosion.getWidth()/2), (int)(point.y+explosion.getHeight()/2));
explosionPlane.setVisibility(true);


Honestly, I think you should focus your project goals. Do the context stuff first. If you finish that, then worry about teaching it to extrapolate from raw text input. For kicks and giggles (really just to please myself and impress people) I would use JSAPI with a great English recognition engine (you can do that in an afternoon) and then get back to the language context.

Thanks a lot, paulscode. I tested it and it works great. I keep meaning to ask you: do you work with AI?

Egon suggested I used the KeyMapper class to improve keyboard-input-reading for the racing game, and so it is that I am. Problem is, the input is at least as bad as it was before with the following code. The idea is that the car speeds up while you're holding down the UP key and slows down when you're holding DOWN, but in practice it only speeds up and slows down when I press, release, and press again. keyPressed at VK_UP sets speedingUp to true, and at VK_DOWN sets slowingDown to true. Shouldn't the car speed up with every loop iteration? It turns just fine. And I did remove the awt KeyListener, by the way, I'm just using its keyPressed because I'm being lazy.

      KeyState state = keyMapper.poll();
      if (state.getState() == KeyState.PRESSED || (speedingUp && state.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_UP) || (slowingDown && state.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_DOWN))
keyPressed(new KeyEvent(this, KeyEvent.KEY_PRESSED, System.currentTimeMillis(), 0, state.getKeyCode(), KeyEvent.CHAR_UNDEFINED));