Best 3D Java Engine

Question

Looking for an easy to use 3D Java Engine API (i.e. not wrapper) that has a good community and good development. Extra features (i.e. audio, input, etc.) are not necessary but nice.

List of the most popular Java 3D graphics APIs I found:

Wrappers / Low Level

• Jogl - Strong community / Good support / Active
• Java3D - Abandoned (or slowly dying), phased out Scene Graph (or re-tooling into JavaFX?)
• lwjgl - Wrapper (Along with audio and input) / Active

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Engines

jMonkey Engine - Wiki - Active - Branching between version 3.0 and 2.0 (may hurt community)

ogre4j - Wiki - Active

• Parent project OGRE - Active - C++

Bindenlicht - No Wiki! - Not active

• Parent project Irrlicht - Wiki - Active - C++

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High Level (Not designed for gaming)

• Processing - Doesn't seem suited for gaming but for graphics visualizations and demos

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Update: Please pick a JAVA engine and explain why its your choice! Thanks!

Answer 1

You are mixing libraries and levels of libraries, Jogl and lwjgl are both pretty thin wrappers around OpenGl (IIRC lwjgl has more wrappers for OpenAL i.e. audio). While you can write a game using pure opengl you will probably spend a lot of time managing geometry, building (or reinventing) a scenegraph and other management functionality.

Processing is mostly 2D oriented.

I don't have any experience with ogre4j, but the last time I looked JMonkey was under current development looking at the 2.0 repository there is a long list of changes that are current.

If you are not too set on using Java consider some of the alternatives Torque (private Scripting Language) Panda3d (python) or the aforementioned OGRE using C++. I don't know what classes and constructs you are talking about in your first paragraph, but having a library or backend that takes care of the scene management, visibility calculations, sound management, game loop, possibly even networking might be a better driver for your decision than a specific language feature.