Atlas City Project

I have installed jMonkey into Netbeans with the Java SE, so I'm ready to do some designing However, we need to start brainstorming what will be in the simulation. My ideas so far is:
1. Visitor Center Scenario (learning what an RBE is)
2. Becoming an Atlasian
3. Emergency Scenarios such as knowledge database server frying , power outages, water purification systems fail, et cetera
4. Overall design of city (be able to walk throughout the city)

It would be great to actually make this like Second Life, where one can actually "live" in Atlas City and collaborate with others in the virtual workshops and learn in the universities. Eventually I would love to make our educational center so advanced that it would take on the similar approach that the University of Pheonix is with being able to get degrees through online class, but only think about being able to take classes online, in the simulated Atlas City and actually get a degree for it.

Anyways, I would love for ideas.

what does monkey j do?

I have long pictured a sort of virtual second life city as being a main goal
for carrying this off.

Autocad crashes past a certain amount of info loaded and sketchup same thing
with less. Then theres the limit of the size that will make it through the file translator without crashing.

I have "spore" for instance on my drive so I know that seamless world interaction is possible, its just not well provided for in draw programs meant to handle orders of magnitude less and smaller things.

what files can be shared and how to such a program?

Can we get these files we are creating imported into it?

in some kind of file type or version?

I honestly don't know if Sketchup files are able to be imported, I seriously doubt it. I believe, just like in most programming, you have to create the objects yourself.

jMonkey is a Java 3d engine that allows you to create games at relatively ease using the programming language called Java. Although the software is easier to use, the actual language isn't all that much (unless you are like me or Josh Aurich) and have been using Java or C++ for a long time.

It is possible for file sharing, however it is a simulator and we should take it one step at a time.

it would be interesting to find out which files types can be imported or are supported for importing.

Maybe its all autocad ..you'd expect it to be something or other.

If not... Then i guess you and others can rebuild looking at the models..

Have you ever seen or played basic civilization games?

The ones where you start out as a tribe and work your way up the technology
tree?

I visualize a similar game, where you have to juggle everything and build
a city while staying still true to your ideals, living in a corporate world,
making money, staying egalitarian, and eventually causing a paradigm shift.

I've played everything from the first Civilization to Civilization IV.

me only one and 2. lol. I got three but it just didn't play as easy for me.

The point is that civilization 2 game i think is pretty simple actually-

Adopt the whole thing and evolve it and its a lot like our own situation.

Building a village to build a small city to build a bigger city to build a new global civilization...

I think it would be cool for us to make our own Atlas spin off of that. We can use FreeCiv and their released source code, modify it and change military to different units.

As far as the creation of a game similar to Second Life, what features should be included when its first released?

we need like a google code project page or something for management of our files

I think the biggest thing we should get down first are the basics. lets get some heightmap data for a piece of desert ( i can do that ) and then make a terrain off of it (this part is fairly easy)

the next part will be getting our movement system down. there is an example in the jmetest.flagrushtut section of the source
did you get JME2 or JME3? JME3 is still in alpha and is not ready for us to be developing something like this with it. we can port over to it later

Also Note JMonkeys's supported files:

Model Loading

COLLADA, 3DS, Obj, MD2, MD3, Milkshape, X3D, ASE support. Supports skin, bones and weighted skeletal animation.

Image Loading

Support BMP, TGA (uncompressed and compressed), JPG, PNG, GIF, DDS (cubemaps + DXT).

I am currently using JME2.