Moonlight|3D

The Subversion repository and the Trac for Moonlight|3D have moved to a new home on the newly created subdomain dev.moonlight3d.eu. Read on for details. The full URL to the new subversion repository location is from now on ... [More] http://dev.moonlight3d.eu/svn/Moonlight and the full URL to the Trac environment is http://dev.moonlight3d.eu/trac/Moonlight The old Subversion repository is no longer reachable and any attempt to acces the old Trac URL will automatically redirect you to the new location. It will take a while until all occurrences of the old URLs are updated properly. Please tell us about any links or URLs which still seem to point to the old places so that we can fix them. If you have checked out the sources of Moonlight|3D you can update your existing working copies. For this you can use "svn switch --relocate http://dev.moonlight3d.eu/svn/Moonlight" on the commandline from within the working copy or use the equivalent functionality offered in your graphical frontends to SVN (often called "switch/relocate"). [Less]

Animations can now be edited in the Moonlight|3D UI. Almost any property can be animated that way. The changes to the mesh data structures are complete and the new code works quite well already. Only a couple of bugs in some mesh tools remain to be ... [More] fixed. All in all we are on our way to a truly exiting new release and Moonlight|3D 0.2.0 will be finished in the next couple of weeks. For the meantime, there are new screenshots showing some of the new features and nightly builds for the curious and impatient. There is finally animation support in Moonlight|3D. Animations can be edited by adding and removing keyframes at the current frame in the property editor using that K button that was added to each property and this works with most types of properties. A new timeline view allows to select a frame of the animation to display and edit. A screenshot that give you an idea of these UI changes has been added to the gallery. There is no proper track editor yet in the current release, but it will be present in Moonlight|3D 0.2.1. You can also create more than one animation for a single scene. This is useful when you need to create more than one animation for an object, e.g. a character, or if a scene has several animated elements which are unrelated, e.g. game levels. Loading and saving animations is still being worked on, as well as some UI glitches that are related to the animation features. This is the main part of the work that remains to be done before the release. The mesh data structure changes are finished except for some tools which misbehave because of subtle changes that were introduced in that process. These will hopefully be completely fixed soon. There will also be a new split face tool in Moonlight|3D 0.2.0. This tool splits a mesh face into two smaller faces by adding a new edge to the mesh. The new colour dialog has been brought into the final form for Moonlight|3D 0.2.0 and can also be seen in the screenshot gallery. It allows you to select a colour in either RGB or HSV colour space and an additional alpha value if that makes sense in that specific context. Right now it looks arguably rudimentary, but in the future this dialog might be extended to include additional elements like HSV colour wheels. Moonlight|3D 0.2.0 will get finished in the next couple of weeks. This version will be an important milestone for the project because it finally adds animation as one big core feature of the program, around which everything else in the program was designed. We encourage you to check out our nightly builds which are updated each and every night, and report your experiences with them either in the forum or in the IRC channel #moonlight3d on irc.freenode.net. Your feedback and criticism is much appreciated. [Less]

A new colour selection dialog that also supports alpha channel editing is available. The mesh data structure optimizations make only slow progress. The animation features are on hold until these changes are complete, which will cause the next release ... [More] to be delayed noticeably. A new colour selection dialog is being made for Moonlight|3D. The current one, which is the default Qt colour selection dialog, lacks some important features like support for alpha values in colours. This new dialog still requires some finishing touches, but if you are curious you are welcome to try it out. It is available as a part of the recent nightly builds. The mesh data structure is progressing, but more slowly than initially expected because debugging is harder than we anticipated. The changes to that code are many, complex, and run deep, so many things got broken in complicated ways. This will also delay the release of version 0.2.0 for several weeks at least. My personal guess is that it will not be ready before the end of April, despite the more optimistic comments in the last progress report. The development of animation features has been frozen because of this, too. At the current stage, keyframe editing is about to be added to the property editor view. But with the focus having shifted towards the mesh data structure for now, this will only be picked up again after the mesh is at least mostly fixed. However, despite all this trouble we will not cut any features that we planned for Moonlight|3D 0.2.0. You will just have to be patient with us. [Less]

Regular nightly builds of Moonlight|3D are available for download now. You can find them at the new nightlies download page. These are unstable development versions, but you are welcome to try them. We hope that these will give you a clearer ... [More] picture of our progress between releases, especially during those periods when we developers are utterly silent. [Less]

Animation support is starting to work. The internal mesh data structures are changed to become more memory efficient and more performant in general, This breaks backwards compatibility, but adds necessary groundwork for many new and important ... [More] features. Moonlight|3D 0.2.0 progresses nicely. First tests demonstrating animated values show that the choices we made roughly 5 years ago were exactly the right ones to make animations in Moonlight|3D possible. A small script already demontrates that animating operator graph node properties is already possible. The user interface is not yet complete, though. A timeline is added to the main window which makes it possbile to go to specific frames or moments in the animation. Simple and direct keyframe editing though the property editor is currently in the making. The completion of this feature will mark the most important step on the road to animation capabilities in Moonlight|3D. In parallel, the data structures which Moonlight|3D uses to store meshes are being changed to be considerably more memory efficient. This change breaks backwards compatibility with scene files from program versions [Less]

After about 5 months of development, Moonlight|3D 0.1.5 is finally finished. It is available as source code and in compiled binary from for Linux/i686, Linux/x86_64 and Windows/i686. The main effort for this release went into lots of internal ... [More] improvements. The most prominent new features in this release are rearrangeable dock widgets and object instancing. The Moonlight Application Framework gets a small update to version 0.1.2 containing small improvements and bugfixes. In this release Moonlight|3D starts to support true object instancing. This means that the same object may appear multiple times in the same scene without having to keep complete copies of the objects in memory. This makes it possible to build scenes with millions of polygons without straining the computer's resources. Newly introduced dock widgets allow nearly free rearrangement of elements in the application's main window. It is now very easy to adjust the interface of Moonlight|3D to one's own personal preferences. Also, some small changes have been made to tools to smooth the program's overall workflow. Although these changes were small and cannot be listed here individually, they add greatly to the overall usability of the program. Finally, Moonlight|3D 0.1.5 is the first release to actually feature the support of OpenEXR images through the use of exrforjava. Version 0.1.5 of Moonlight|3D is available for Linux and Windows from the downloads page. This release will be the last in the 0.1.x cycle. From now on the main development focus will be on the implementation of basic animation features. The Moonlight Application Framework has seen some improvements and bug fixes since the last release. As already mentioned in the last progress report, these are: Hungarian transation (contributed by Gaàl Gergely) Bugfix in the property sheet Exception dialog now displays the stack trace in a textbox (enabling copy & paste of the trace) The Moonlight Application Framework 0.1.2 is available as source code for download here. [Less]

The huge internal changes needed for adding object instancing to Moonlight|3D are finished at last. Only some minor polishing is needed before the next release. The Moonlight Application Framework will have a parallel release with few minor changes. ... [More] The roadmap for Moonlight|3D will see some updates. The biggest change on the road to Moonlight|3D version 0.1.5 is complete: objects now have their own coordinate system which is mapped into global space. Also, there can be more than one mapping for one object, in other words: objects can now be instanced. This allows you to keep multiple copies of the same object in the scene without wasting the memory that full copies would take. Sunflow is also fully aware of these instances. This is the single most important new feature in the upcoming release. The next release will happen soon, but not before some minor, annoying and mostly unrelated bugs are fixed (for instance, the Divide Edges tool is broken). Expect the release in early January. The full list of new features in Moonlight|3D 0.1.5 is therefore: Object instancing Rearrangeable dock widgets in the main window Scroll wheel can be used to dolly (move camera in/out) The Moonlight Application Framework, on which Moonlight|3D is now based, will be released at the same time in version 0.1.2 with 3 minor updates: Hungarian transation (contributed by Gaàl Gergely) Bugfix in the property sheet Exception dialog now displays the stack trace in a textbox (enabling copy & paste of the trace) The roadmap past this upcoming release will see some change, though. Currently it mentions a version 0.1.6 with performance improvements in the mesh processing and then following it a version 0.2.0 containing the first set of animation functions. This is likely to get swapped around with the basic animation functionality being implemented next, before any performance improvements. This change in the roadmap is because Moonlight|3D has been designed with animation in mind from the beginning and the day on which version 0.2.0 gets released will mark the implementation of all aspects of the originally envisioned design for this application. [Less]

Version 0.1.1 of the Moonlight Application Framework, a minimal, but complete framework for Qt Jambi based applications, has been released today. This features some small, but important updates and bugfixes. The most noticeable changes are: ... [More] Localisation support including a proof-of-concept German translation for the user interface Bug fixes in the build files Updated bundled exrforjava to version 0.6.2 Additionally, the Qt Jambi binaries are no longer bundled in the downloadable source archive for licensing reasons and have to be downloaded separately. The complete source code for the framework is available for download here. [Less]

The Moonlight|3D source code and Moonlight Application Framework source code contain notes stating that they are licensed under the terms of the GPL. However, they come bundled with the binaries of the free version of Qt Jambi, which is licensed only ... [More] under the terms of the GPL. Because of this bundling the terms of the GPL apply to the whole package. This situation has not been represented correctly by the licensing documents that are included in the download packages that are available. Read on for a more detailed explanation of the issue. Because the licensing isn't spelled out clearly enough in the download packages, a few words are needed to clarify the situation. First, the inclusion of the full text of the LGPL gives the wrong impression that the whole package is covered by this license. The downloadable software is actually covered by the GPL, which is not documented inside the downloadable archive. For that reason, download links to older versions of the software, which are affected, have been removed. The software will still be available on request, though. The download links for the current versions of Moonlight|3D and the Moonlight Application Framework will be removed as soon as new versions are released which will have this issue fixed. Second, we will still be able to offer an opportunity to write commercial or non-free plugins or applications on top of the software that we create. To achieve this, we will provide dedicated source code archives for future releases which will not include Qt Jambi. Third party developers will have to provide their own copy of Qt Jambi to be able to compile the source code. This gives them the chance to purchase a commercial license for Qt Jambi directly from Trolltech and use the code of Moonlight|3D and the Moonlight Application Framework under its original LGPL license. Binary downloads, which are provided directly by us, howerver, will still be licensed under the terms of the GPL, because they will contain the free version of Qt Jambi for the respective platform as an integral part of the bundle. Lastly, we thank the people at Trolltech which have kindly pointed out this licensing issue to us. As always, they have been extremely friendly and forthcoming. [Less]

The Moonlight Application Framework 0.1.0 has been released today. It is a minimal, but complete framework for Qt Jambi based applications that has been developed as part of Moonlight|3D and is now being released separately so that it can serve as a ... [More] basis for other applications as well. Features of the the application framework include: plugin-based application architecture dynamic user interface assembly from plugin-provided contributions easy to use preferences system full management of loaded documents (creation, loading, saving, ...) full support for headless operation As development of the framework progresses, more features and plugins will be added to the application framework. This will include among other things full python scripting support and a full localization support. It available here. [Less]