0.6 released

[renanse]

Ardor3D's development team is proud to announce the 0.6 release of their API. This new release features several new major features such as CPU and GPU based skinning, "MegaTexture" support, procedural terrain and image generation, an Ardor3D based user-interface system, improved automatic resource cleanup and much more.

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

What's new:

• New CPU/GPU capable skeletal skinning framework.
• TextureClipMap (Megatexture) for use in Terrain or other geometry texturing.
• Ardor3D based UI System
• Completely rewritten Collada Importer - now much more functional and no longer requires JiBX.
• 3D Math functions (noise, fbm, etc.) and utilities for visualizing these as procedural textures or height-maps.
• BloomRenderPass, allowing simple addition of a "bloom" effect.
• Much improved, automatic resource cleanup - now handles detection of GPU referenced items being gc'd and automatically removes them from the card for you.
• Basic support for applets in place.

API Improvements / Changes:

• Terrain system now supports non-wrapping terrain, terrain transformations, improved fog, user definable height ranges and user initiated height-map updates.
• Water use "Oblique near frustum clipping" instead of OpenGL clip-planes to enable clipping on objects with shaders and has the ability to blur reflections.
• Terrain and Water now work a lot nicer together (see TerrainWaterExample)
• FBO texture rendering now supports multi-sample.
• Curve-based transform controllers for smooth character/camera control.
• ResourceLocator system now uses an extensible ResourceSource interface for finding resources.
• Transparency render type hint added allowing control over one and two pass transparency rendering from within the Scene itself.
• Game task queues now ref'd by Object instead of RenderContext allowing for custom or cross context queues.
• AwtCanvas is now split into jogl and lwjgl versions to disconnect ardor3d-awt from an lwjgl dependency.
• Shadow system now supports directional lights and casting shadows through alpha test enabled textures.
• Shadow system now respects Mesh flag "castsShadows"
• Older shadow systems have now been dropped in favor of our PSSM implementation.
• Texture's "blendColor" field renamed to "constantColor" to more accurately reflect use.
• Added image loader for Ardor3D binary format (.abi)
• Added ability to update the face of an existing cube map texture via the renderer.
• Support added to the Renderer for setting scissor area.
• Now supports compilation on OpenSolaris
• Now supports Solaris SWT in maven config
• Lots of javadoc and comments added.
• Lots of other small API tweaks and cleanup.

Bugs Addressed:

• Fixed bug in AWT that prevented grabbed from working properly.
• Bounding transforms now correctly apply non-rotational matrices properly from the Transform class.
• Fixed full screen mode issues happening on some Linux distros.
• Fixed bug in Transform.getGLApplyMatrix where matrix was missing a "1" at 3, 3
• Fixed bug in Texture state texGen application where wrong mode might be set.
• Fixed bug in Triangle class where point A was returned for getB and getC.
• and more... lots more.

[mulova]

Long waited for this! I'd like to run the tests and use it.

[nymon]

Keep up the phenomenal work!

[thecookie]

Grats! Good work!

[ashenback]

Sweet work! Megatextures, gotta try this one out