That is really great Raft!  Nicely done!  You should call it A* 3D  since it handles elevations.

I got Werdy out of there last night and replaced him with a small 3DS model of a camera.  That is the focal point for the JPCT camera.  It will always look at it, pan and zoom around it using the arrow keys and F1 F2 for pitch.  If you go into "select mode" and select the camera like you would any other object in the kit, those arrow keys move the camera object around the level instead, with F1 and F2 controlling the Y-Axis.  That way you simply put it where you are working on the X, Y, Z plane, unselect it, and pan/zoom/pitch around the new location.

The class I wrote stubs out using multiple cameras with the idea being you could create a bunch and toggle around the level at will but I'm going to move on to XML persistence instead so I can get the code out as planned.  After I distribute the code I'll be using this thing pretty heavily myself for Werdy level design so I'll enhance as I go.

There are two additional things I want to add:

1.  PROXY OBJECTS
For example - Spawn Points and Portal Points and Trigger Point.  They will be colored cubes in the editor basically.  A Spawn Point would have a few name/value pairs to go with it like type=npc, name=my_game_specific_creature_name, file=/my/lame/model.3ds.  I will have an XML template that defines the names and you can just change it to suit.  When the XML persists they will save with it.
A Portal Point will define an area that triggers a terrain swap for the World.  You can use it for a hard unload/reload of a level or a simple transition from outdoor to indoor. 
A Trigger Point is just an object to define an area that is intended to cause some effect - such as automatically opening a door as something approaches.

2.  LIGHTING PROXY OBJECTS Like the old UnrealEd.  Place a torch in the world as a proxy for a light, specify the RGB etc.

 

Fine. I can do that in a few days once I clean things up a bit so its more usable.  I would rather send it to folks like Remo initially so something more polished can be produced first - but if there is limited interest I'll just post the code and move on.

I'll check them out.  Thanks.

Are people going to want the source when its done?

Nice.  Culling and Transparency would be perfect.

I just tried Launch4J which creates a windows executable.  If platform is Windows only it might be an option for you.  Just to note though I only tried software mode since here at work I don't have OpenGL support.  I'm a bit worried about that -Djava.library.path=%LIB% thing.  Not sure how that is going to take exactly unless the configuration tool supports relative paths on that.

Also - I had to keep the classpath Jar references outside of the executable in a "3rdParty" directory.  I'm sure I could have exploded out all the underlying class files in my jar root though.  That wont help the JNI situation though.