Not a good week for development.

The headgear is done, the divers are in, and I was ready to start doing a serious dive into the Java3D sound capabilities (as per Section 2 of the plan “Develop codebase for testing haptic rendering”). Then my father got sick and landed in the hospital for a week. Which kinda shot productivity to hell.

Anyway, I’m picking up the pieces. The (official) java3d.java.net site was down for most of yesterday, so I’ve only just connected to it again. So far I’ve downloaded and installed the AMD64 version of the jar files, hooked up my Eclipse IDE to the J3d-examples subversion repository (https://svn.java.net/svn/j3d-examples~svn).

The downloaded code compiles and runs as an ant file, but the structure doesn’t accommodate Eclipse’s code navigation for some reason. To fix this, I created a new Java project and copied the entire “resources” tree over and the tree that starts under “classes” in the original file. Here’s a screenshot:

J3D project layout

This still didn’t compile though. I got an “Access restriction on class due to restriction on required library“, which I’ve never seen before. Poking around led me to StackOverflow, where there was this suggestion:

“go to java build path and under Library tab, remove JRE System Library. Then again Add Library –> JRE System Library”

Well, that makes no sense. It is just deleting and re-adding the system library. On the other hand, that’s exactly the kind of senseless thing that fixes weird errors, so I gave it a shot. Worked like a charm.

Anyway, now I’m having problems locating files that are right where the code says they are, but the loader’s can’t find them. Regardless, it’s time to go take care of Dad.