Time for action – navigating the scene

Let's look at things from a different perspective:

In your Java code, you can access the current camera location, which is also the location of the player in a first-person game, using getters on the cam object:

Vector3f   loc = cam.getLocation();
Quaternion rot = cam.getRotation();

If you want the camera to start out at a different location in the scene, position it using the following:

cam.setLocation(x,y,z);
cam.setRotation(q);

The default navigational keys in the included samples are optimized for QWERTY keyboards. Every game has its unique navigation that you will have to define yourself, including a way to let your users with a non-QWERTY keyboard customize the keys.

Note that cam.setRotation(q) is one of the rotation methods that accepts the Quaternion data type, which we just learned about, as an argument.