Work continues forward as usual at Ardor Labs, most recently with various interesting projects in Animation and other areas related to Ardor3D.  As a side project though, I've been spending some time with my three brothers knocking together a remake of the old Lode Runner game.  For my brothers (I'm the eldest) I hope it's an interesting experience in game design and programming.  For me, it's been a nice way to relax as well as a good exercise for seeing through a project using Ardor3D from conception to realization.  It's a 2D game, so it doesn't stress the tech much, but it has revealed a few rough edges I'd like to smooth out.

Together we've probably managed to put in about 4-5 solid days total over the past month between hashing out the design, tasks, and some programming and basic art.  We have a nice XML-based map format and loader, as well as pluggable visual themes, a solid game state system, map visualizer and player control.  When time permits, next tasks will include adding in digging (very important), treasures, and enemies.

I'll throw up a screen-shot for posterity sake. :)  None of us are artists, so if you'd like to contribute your art skills, drop me a line.

So last night my 1TB Apple Time Capsule shut off, never to turn on again.  I'm not exactly sure how long I've had it, but probably in the neighborhood of 18 months or so... which jives well with stats I've found around the net.  I'm very disappointed with Apple and what was supposed to be a "highly reliable" backup solution.  Seems in the interests of aesthetics, they decided to ignore certain laws of physics regarding heat.

So, no I will not be replacing it with another Apple product.  Back to ol' Linksys for me... at least until that one goes a day out of warranty and instantly fries itself too. :-/

May the year ahead bring each of us further down those paths whereon our hopes and hearts lie.  Best wishes!

As a little after-hours project, Rikard and I have been helping out a team who needed a "planetary evolution" display for some exhibit over in Europe. The idea is to evoke a sense of wonder at how many possible planets there are out there, and that they've been evolving over millions of years, etc. As a volunteer side project, we were only able to put a small portion of our time towards it, but I think it's come along nicely. You can check out a little video below showing a couple of the planets in the mix. It's a bit slow, but might make a nice screen saver. :)

Basically you're seeing Ardor3D's procedural texture generation, plus some atmosphere and bloom in GLSL with a little camera work thrown in. No sound, sorry.

Enjoy!

So being Thanksgiving today I found myself with some free time on my hands whilest waiting for the Turkey feast to commence. So, what else to do but tinker a little more with the Ardor3D Left4Dead map viewer? :) This time I thought I'd pull out the hexviewer and try to figure out what extra bits were added to the file format in L4D2. Turns out... not much (or at least, not much in the areas that David and I have figured out so far.) A couple extra int reads later and I got the following. (Fun fact, these are running at 1680x1050 with 4x FSAA and I'm getting 60-200 FPS on average.)

(click for larger versions)








Pretty fun to fly smoothly around. Definitely still lots missing... lighting on certain types of objects... detail models... normal maps, etc. Maybe one of these will be my black friday or Christmas day project. :P

I'm proud to announce we've just launched the official 0.6 release of Ardor3D today.

"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."

See the full release with all the juicy details over at the forums.

Rikard and I have been working hard recently on two new systems for Ardor3D that combine to make fun little demos (and even better games and apps!) Those systems are a new jDOM based Collada importer and a Skinning system. We finally have the first cut of these done and just about ready to make public, so I decided to pop up a short video to celebrate.

Unfortunately I have not been sleeping much lately and am pretty sick, so no voice overs and I totally screwed up the screen ratio when I converted the video to YouTube... Oh well. Check it out below or here on YouTube:

I recently put together a small demo clip running through our procedural terrain example. Check it out here on YouTube:

Among other work projects, I've been able to get into animation systems this week - and I feel comfortable promising that you will see a lot of progress for Ardor3D there over the next 2-3 months! :)

Since Petter (who wrote the stubs and code currently sitting in ardor3d-animations) has stepped away from us for a while due to family and job/commute pressures, I've decided to start fresh, using the knowledge and mistakes I made on the jME skin and bone system as a start and drawing some good inspiration from Jason Gregory's (Naughty Dog) book, Game Engine Architecture (highly recommended reading).

Also worth a big mention is that we're currently looking at a shift away from using JiBX to using JDOM for parsing Collada. While JiBX was getting the basic job done, it has been a pain in a number of areas, particularly the development process which helps no one. I like the tech, but probably not for something as massive and tangled as the Collada spec. JDOM will allow us to more easily ignore areas we don't support, as well as make development more simple (no class decoration step, etc.)

More on all of this as it develops.

Yet another rumor to add weight to the possible demise of JavaOne... An article entitled "Sun management stumbled on EU Oracle probe" on The Register is claiming they have "learned that there will be no more JavaOne conferences under the new Oracle owner."

Until Oracle comes out and confirms this (assuming the Oracle-Sun deal goes through) it's all still anyone's guess. Personally however I would not be all that surprised if this were true. JavaOne has (to me) recently seemed to be branching out into lots of tangents over the last few years and Oracle already has their own annual conference in a similar vein. Maybe they can plan a party with better entertainment than Grinder Girl (see ~4:00) / Mini Kiss? (At least they had battlebots that night)

As Malachi posts in his blog, perhaps this is an opportunity to spawn a smaller, different style of Java enthusiast annual meetup? I would vote for something that had a heavier emphasis on gaming/entertainment. :)