My Project and some Questions about jPCT Features

[fm27]

Hello Community!

I am working on a scientific thesis these days where I want to develop a simulation-software for
small robots (lego mindstorms) driving, orientating and communicating inside a virtual 3D environment.
These robots shell have actors (to perform their movement in the scene) and sensors (for their orientation in the scene).

I am a real newbie in writing simulation-programms and I have never written a 3d-game before too.
But I want to use a 3D-(Game)-Engine for my work an, and I am searching for an appropriate one.

1. Is is possibile to create a virtual 3D Environment including placing the robot, placing objects and texturing floor, walls and arbitary scene objects (at runntime) using JPCT?

2. Is it possible to read values from the scene for example with JPCT... for example
-- the color and brightness of the object which is in front of a robot
-- the distance to the next obstacle

3. Is is possible to manipulate the scene at runtime.. means changing position and state of objects and robots?

4. Has JPCT built-in collision detection (collision detection between robots and obstacles should be possible.)

5. Has JPCT built-in physics like gravity, friction and idleness/inertia?

6. Is it possible to save the state of a scene and to load it later?

7. Does JPCT have a built-in renderer which is able to render the scene continously?

8. Is there a higher level documentation besides the Javadoc?

Do you think JPCT would be a good choice?

Thanks in advance!

[EgonOlsen]

1. Is is possibile to create a virtual 3D Environment including placing the robot, placing objects and texturing floor, walls and arbitary scene objects (at runntime) using JPCT?

Yes.

2. Is it possible to read values from the scene for example with JPCT... for example
-- the color and brightness of the object which is in front of a robot
-- the distance to the next obstacle

I'm not sure if i get this question. Yes, you can calculate the distance between objects or any other distance between vectors. And you can get the color of an object if you have assigned one. What you can't do (because it happens on the GPU), is to get the actual render color of an object, because it is influenced by lighting, transparency settings, textures...

3. Is is possible to manipulate the scene at runtime.. means changing position and state of objects and robots?

Of course it is.

4. Has JPCT built-in collision detection (collision detection between robots and obstacles should be possible.)

Yes. It has ray-polygon, sphere-polygon and ellipsoid-polygon collision detection.

5. Has JPCT built-in physics like gravity, friction and idleness/inertia?

No. jPCT is 3D engine, not a physics engine. But there are tutorial about how to combine jPCT with jBullet for this.

6. Is it possible to save the state of a scene and to load it later?

Kind of. There is a method to serialize a world to xml and reload it later. But to be honest, i would simply write this myself by saving some object properties in some custom format.

7. Does JPCT have a built-in renderer which is able to render the scene continously?

jPCT has a software renderer, a software-hardware-hybrid renderer and a pure hardware renderer. It can render into a canvas or a native window. Apart from that, i don't get the question...

8. Is there a higher level documentation besides the Javadoc?

There's a wiki: http://www.jpct.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Do you think JPCT would be a good choice?

I wrote it. How am i supposed to comment on this? All i can say is that it wouldn't be the first thesis that uses jPCT.