0.5 released

[renanse]

Ardor3D's development team is proud to announce the 0.5 release of their API. This new release features important base functionality improvements, such as context sensitive VBO and display list support as well as new effects such as terrain and water rendering.

Check it out today at http://www.ardor3d.com.

What's new:

• 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.

Improvements and API changes:

• GameTaskQueue now has a time limit when executing multiple tasks per execute call. executeAll field is thus renamed executeMultiple.
  
• Default render bucket type is now Opaque instead of Skip.
  
• Fixed resource loading issue in Collada Loader that prevented texture loading on some models.
  
• Vector4 can now be used as a ShaderUniform.
  
• GLSLShaderDataLogic interface now takes a Mesh instead of a MeshData.
  
• MeshData FloatBuffer and IntBuffer fields now wrapped in FloatBufferData and IntBufferData classes (similar to, and replacing the TexCoords class). These classes allow for setting number of components per field type as well as tracking opengl ids for VBOs.
  
• Controller class has been replaced with a much simplified SpatialController interface. Old Controller functionality kept as the new ComplexSpatialController class.
  
• Controllers are only saved during Savable serialization if SpatialController implementor also implements Savable.
  
• LittleEndien renamed LittleEndianDataInput.
  
• Node updates children in reverse order to allow for child deletion during update.
  
• OpenGL Context sharing in Jogl is no much more robust.
  
• More robust implementation of Quaternion fromVectorToVector added.
  
• getNormalizedDeviceCoordinates methods added to Camera.
  
• AwtColorUtil: New Awt color <-> Ardor ColorRGBA utility class added to the ardor3d-awt package.
  
• AwtImageLoader util can now handle RenderedImage and RenderableImage types.
  
• TextureManager now only maintains one copy of a loaded texture.
  
• Textures now track their id per gl context.
  
• Now using lwjgl 2.1.0
  
• Now using Google Collections 1.0 rc1
  
• improved javadoc in many places.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed issue with BMFonts generated with the tool option "match character height".
  
• LittleEndianDataInput reader will no longer silently fail when reading past the end of a file.
  
• LittleEndianDataInput now properly implements readFully(...)
  
• Fixed bug in Transform where translated Transforms where still considered "identity".
  
• FSAA now possible in JoglCanvas (already worked in LwjglCanvas.)
  
• Fixed excessive object creation in box bounding types.
  
• Incorrect support check fixed during wrap apply for cubemap textures.
  
• setSwarmOffset was incorrectly setting swarmPoint.
  
• More fixes to allow for proper warmup of Particle systems.
  
• Several other small fixes.

[mulova]

Awesome.
Most of all, I like DisplayList improvement! Thanks a lot.

[gouessej]

getNormalizedDeviceCoordinates methods added to Camera

It is interesting

OpenGL Context sharing in Jogl is no much more robust

Can you tell me more about it?