Ardor3D release 0.5 is out

[renanse]

Hey folks,

Just wanted to announce that Ardor3D has hit its 0.5 release.  We've managed to keep up a good pace thanks to having some interesting projects using the engine and helping push us along.

Highlights:

• Headless rendering support added.  You can now render 3d content without a visible 3d display.
• Vertex Buffer Object support added as an inheritable flag - also supports automatic buffer combining for more optimization.
• Display List support added.  You can now compile individual meshes or entire scenegraph branches as a display list.
• High quality water rendering support added as a node that can be easily inserted into your scene.
• First edition of our geometry clipmap terrain system added.
• New render delegate ability added to Spatial.  You can now bypass draw operations with a RenderDelegate at any point in the scenegraph.
• Multi-context scenegraph support: The same scenegraph can now be drawn to several canvases even if they do not share the same GL context.

You can read the full change list here.

[gouessej]

Hi!

It sounds good but I still hesitate in encouraging its use in the corporation where I work. We need a good 3D engine for the GIS but we absolutely need an excellent JOGL/Java2D/AWT/Swing support as the current suite of softwares heavily relies on these APIs. The support of the display list is an excellent piece of news What about VBO? Can you tell me when you assume the JOGL renderer will be usable in production phase? If it can be ready even in one year, it will be better than nothing and enough to allow me to push "your" engine here.

[renanse]

VBO is the second bullet in the above list.

In my opinion, our JOGL1 renderer should be just as good as our LWJGL renderer at this point and it is in production (we have folks at NASA using Ardor3D/JOGL/SWT.)  If there is an inconsistency or issue though, please let us know. 

Outside the renderer though I know of two JOGL "issues" right now.  The first one is that we don't include all of the various possible natives for JOGL, so you may have to pull certain platforms down yourself.  The second one is that our AWT canvas integration is currently bound to LWJGL but that should be changed soon as well.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[gouessej]

Hi!

VBO is the second bullet in the above list.

This is an excellent piece of news 

In my opinion, our JOGL1 renderer should be just as good as our LWJGL renderer at this point and it is in production (we have folks at NASA using Ardor3D/JOGL/SWT.)  If there is an inconsistency or issue though, please let us know.

I use lots of very crappy machines. If there is something wrong, I will discover it if I have to make a small demo (sorry but there is a real lack of examples, tutorials and documentations as your engine is young; if I had a kind of Hello World example, it would be nice). The previous code of the JOGL renderer of JME 2 supposes everyone has nice graphics cards with shader support, I hope you haven't done such beginner's mistakes.

Outside the renderer though I know of two JOGL "issues" right now.  The first one is that we don't include all of the various possible natives for JOGL, so you may have to pull certain platforms down yourself. 

It is not a problem as I already do this for JME 2, I deploy JOGL 1.1.1 separately by myself. Has your engine been tested under Solaris 10?

The second one is that our AWT canvas integration is currently bound to LWJGL but that should be changed soon as well.

But did you test the whole AWT things under both Linux and Windows as there are some tiny differences that may cause some very annoying bugs especially in keyboard and mouse handling? ( I don't want to pay twice to fix them)

[renanse]

(sorry but there is a real lack of examples, tutorials and documentations as your engine is young; if I had a kind of Hello World example, it would be nice).

We are doing a better job with javadoc and code commenting I think... but do need more general documentation.  We also have over 40 examples in our examples package.
 

The previous code of the JOGL renderer of JME 2 supposes everyone has nice graphics cards with shader support, I hope you haven't done such beginner's mistakes.

Such a way with words.  hehe. 

Has your engine been tested under Solaris 10?

No.  None of us have a machine running Solaris.  Maybe at JavaOne I'll get a chance though.

But did you test the whole AWT things under both Linux and Windows as there are some tiny differences that may cause some very annoying bugs especially in keyboard and mouse handling? ( I don't want to pay twice to fix them)

As I mentioned, this is still an area under development.  We'll keep an eye out.