FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

JavaFX links of the week, May 6

Hi all. Welcome to another weeks worth of links. There is, as is becoming all too frequent, a great number of links this week, spanning new downloads, 3D investigations, embedded discussions and interesting new tools and libraries being developed by people in the community. Keep up the great work! 🙂

See – I told you it was a great list of links! 🙂 Catch you all next week, and keep up the great work.

3D SpaceNavigator with JavaFX

I just got a 3D Connexion SpaceNavigator which is a kind of 3D input device(mouse/stick). It is cool to use when 3D modeling content for JavaFX but I thought it would be even better if I could navigate my JavaFX 3D scenes using it. I managed to hack some quick code to get it working in JavaFX. Many thanks to the JInput project, they made it super easy. Its super fun so I recoded a little video to share with you.

SpaceNavigator with JavaFX from Jasper Potts on Vimeo.

The code really is very simple, I just have a AnimationTimer that every frame checks to get the current inputs from device and applies them to the camera transforms. The device via jinput provides 6 floats for each axis and 2 booleans for the buttons, so could not be easier to connect to your app. Below is complete 3D app with a simple cube. I will be working on getting the object importers out in open source for you to use very soon 🙂

public class InputTestBlog extends Application {
    private ControllerEnvironment controllerEnvironment;
    private Controller spaceNavigator;
    private Component[] components;
    private Translate translate;
    private Rotate rotateX,rotateY,rotateZ;

    @Override public void start(Stage stage) throws Exception {
        controllerEnvironment = ControllerEnvironment.getDefaultEnvironment();
        Controller[] controllers = controllerEnvironment.getControllers();
        for(Controller controller: controllers){
            if ("SpaceNavigator".equalsIgnoreCase(controller.getName())){
                spaceNavigator = controller;
                System.out.println("USING Device ["+controller.getName()+"] of type ["+controller.getType().toString()+"]");
                components = spaceNavigator.getComponents();
            }
        }

        Group root = new Group();
        Scene scene = new Scene(root, 1024, 768, true);
        stage.setScene(scene);
        scene.setFill(Color.GRAY);
        // CAMERA
        final PerspectiveCamera camera = new PerspectiveCamera(true);
        scene.setCamera(camera);
        root.getChildren().add(camera);
        // BOX
        Box testBox = new Box(5,5,5);
        testBox.setMaterial(new PhongMaterial(Color.RED));
        testBox.setDrawMode(DrawMode.LINE);
        root.getChildren().add(testBox);
        // MOVE CAMERA
        camera.getTransforms().addAll(
                rotateY = new Rotate(-20, Rotate.Y_AXIS),
                rotateX = new Rotate(-20, Rotate.X_AXIS),
                rotateZ = new Rotate(0, Rotate.Z_AXIS),
                translate = new Translate(5, -5, -15)
        );
        // SHOW STAGE
        stage.show();
        // CHECK FOR INPUT
        if (spaceNavigator != null) {
            new AnimationTimer() {
                @Override public void handle(long l) {
                    if (spaceNavigator.poll()) {
                        for(Component component: components) {
                            switch(component.getName()) {
                                case "x":
                                    translate.setX(translate.getX() + component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "y":
                                    translate.setY(translate.getY()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "z":
                                    translate.setZ(translate.getZ()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "rx":
                                    rotateX.setAngle(rotateX.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "ry":
                                    rotateY.setAngle(rotateY.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "rz":
                                    rotateZ.setAngle(rotateZ.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }.start();
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.setProperty("net.java.games.input.librarypath", new File("lib").getAbsolutePath());
        launch(args);
    }
}