charlie {l Wrote}:At some point soon I'm going to dabble with programming a basic 3D game for Java and I'd rather not get involved in a heavyweight 3D engine straight away (and risk demotivation due to overcomplication) just because it is well known when there could be a better alternative out there.
Are you still considering doing this? I was screwing around this month with setting up a 3D project using Apache Maven, and I got it to work with Ardor3D using LWJGL. If you want me to upload my project files somewhere, I can do this as an updated tutorial seems to be lacking on this subject.
Considering the engines you list in the OP, I assume you're targeting the JVM on desktop systems, and not Android or some cross-compiler such as GWT.
If something like Maven or Gradle is a requirement for your project, then for heavyweights, Ardor3D may be the way to go as they're the only ones I know who deploy to a Maven repository.
For lightweights, LWJGL is available on Maven Central starting with version 2.8.0. Ardor3D also has older versions on
their own repository system.
JOGL used to be the case, but I'm not too sure if later versions are any more.
JMonkeyEngine uses Gradle, and as far as I can tell they don't uses a Maven repository like other projects that use Gradle do, and thus it requires manual installation.
LibGDX, from what I can tell, does not and they distribute Eclipse project files with their source code which is kind've silly.
Xith3D probably does not, but I'm not entirely sure. They distribute Eclipse project files with their sources as well, but they also use Apache Ant.
Crossfire and Wesnoth played a game of chess. It started out as an open game.