i.e. whether i push forward or backward,  i always go in the same direction

Which direction is that? I can't see something obviously wrong in your code ATM.

I'll just manually call the GC whenever I get new polygons.

You don't have to. The VM will do it for you before giving an out of memory error. If it still occurs, there must be a reference somewhere to the objects that should be collected.

At last, here is my question: Using the GeneralVertexController, am I allowed to change the number of vertices in a Mesh (i.e. replace the whole SimpleVector array)? Or am I only allowed to change the vertex coordinates? Thanks! And any other suggestions would be appreciated. The JPCT framework is great, very fast and easy to use.

No, you can't change the number, but you can initialize it with a number "high enough" and simply set unused vertices to coords out of view. That what i'm doing for the fog of war in Paradroidz. However, i'm not sure that the VertexController is a good idea, because you would have to calculate normales yourself and can't modify the texture coords. Why don't you simply create new Object3Ds from your data stream and discard old ones? If you are not referencing them yourself somewhere, the garbage collector will clean them up after you've removed them from your world. Or did i get you wrong?

1) The scans are placed on a thin slice as a texture, the slices (object3D's) are then made transparent(0), however -- it's still very hard to see "inside" the brain without moving the slices further apart.

0 is the lowest possible setting for transparency in the software renderer, so there's no way to make them more transparent when not using hardware. Maybe picking a slice with the mouse is an option. If it's picked, you could temporary remove all slices above or make the picked slice slide out somehow.

In the actual applet you can swirl the scans around using the arrow buttons, but unfortunately my service provider doesn't allow applets to read files (textures) from the server itself. So I only have images to show.

How it that done and why? It should be quite transparent for the server if a browser is reading the files or an applet is. However, how about putting the files in the applet's jar and load them from there.

Oh, and...nice brain... :wink:

i once thought of a object or polygonRendered method to add to paintListener interface but Egon said it wont do the trick since rendering is done from front to back for optimization purposes (Egon please correct me if i remember it wrong)

No, you are remembering that correctly. That's one reason why it doesn't work, but there are others too. The one and correct way to do it, would be to write into the zBuffer when  doing 2d blitting in these cases but that's not a good idea for other reasons.

Yes. It's not forgotten, just delayed. I should be able to upload it next week.

I've played it for some time today. Here are my thoughts:

- It's quite laggy from time to time. You click to move or attack and the command is executed up to one second later. That's quite annoying but i assume that it's due to my bad pings to the server (ranging from 90 to 700ms). It plays ok when pings are around 100ms, but 200 and above is noticable laggy.

- I got stuck two times. The game was still running, but i couldn't move. One time, it seemed to be related to collision detection. I tried to walk through two tents in the Muton area above the starting point. I failed to pass them but i couldn't go back either. The other time, i somehow screwed up the inventory.  The upper left box was always highlighted when entering the menu and i was able to highlight all others too by clicking into them. But i wasn't able to use the inventory itself and i couldn't move anymore after leaving it.

- Sometimes, my character ran right into a Muton when i was actually trying to attack him...:?

- I think that you should change the background color from black to the same light brown that the fog has.

- You can talk to NPCs and buy things as soon as they come into view. That should be limited to a smaller area around them IMHO.

- At times where the pings were better, i enjoyed playing it. You should make it possible to store the character on the server when leaving and let the NPCs only train you when you've enough experience points. That way, it's possible to concentrate on character development as a starting point to extend the gameplay and explore the world.

- I'm loving the forests. I'm always looking for trees in the sectors and run right to them when i found some. I usually skip sectors without any trees... :wink:

Edit: Maybe changing the sort offset on the shadows of the decorations helps to avoid the flickering between them and the plants. Something like Object3D.setSortOffset(100)...i'm not sure if it's really a good idea but it's worth a try.

I only can Imagine that is due to the 24 bpp instead of the 32bpp.

for example it shows only a color that seems to move when using textures that I took with a diigtal camera.

No, it's for sure not due to that. Sounds more like you are not calling build() or at least recreateTextureCoords() after assigning the texture. Two screen shots for comparision would be helpful.