Holiday Greetings!
So, obviously we've been running in silent mode a bit these past few months, which is more than a little frustrating to me since I enjoy sharing what I'm working on. That should change very soon as we launch a new addition to the Ardor Labs product line. This product will be focused entirely on the web and be run a little differently from Ardor3D, so it should complement rather than replace our existing technology and, I believe, foster innovation in both.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all! See you in 2012!
Best wishes,
-- Josh "Renanse" Slack
PS: On a personal note, we're still waiting for our baby boy to arrive. Any day now!
Sweden bound
Looking forward to heading over to Sweden soon to see friends and work hard on the future direction of Ardor Labs. I'm pretty excited as it will be my first time in that country - a place that several of my ancestors called home. Also, I'm looking forward to being in a room with Rikard, some snacks and a white board. Way easier to focus and progress the work without all the distractions of energetic kids, other projects and 7 time zones in the way. :)
If you are in the Stockholm area and would like to break bread or just say hi, give me a shout.
If you are in the Stockholm area and would like to break bread or just say hi, give me a shout.
What's Going On?
It's been a real hot summer here in Texas, which means I've spent a lot of time indoors at the computer. Ok, who am I kidding, I would have been at the computer anyway. For those who are wondering what that means for Ardor3D, here's some updates.
First of all, I'm pretty excited that NASA scientists planning missions for the next generation Mars rover, and reading/using the science it produces, will have Ardor3D under the hood. Rikard and I are working on more terrain improvements for this effort that will make their way into Ardor3D in the next couple of months. The major focus is on terrain+shadow work.
After a lot of delay caused by family matters (crazy how passing ons and new babies put a lot in perspective - and on hold) for both Rikard and myself, a long overdue interview with the Caromble team is coming together. If you are not familiar with the project, I would describe it as Breakout meets Katamari. Do yourself a favor and go check out their site. (And as alluded to above, Rikard's family has added another beautiful baby girl. Send him your congrats!)
Continuing on the Ardor3D front, a commercial game studio that I can not yet name has been contributing a lot recently to Ardor3D by finding areas to improve in animation and general performance. I'm hoping they get out of "silent" mode in the near future so you all can offer your thanks. :) In the meantime, enjoy the tweaks added to trunk.
As a final thought on Ardor3D I'd like to briefly mention the work that Rikard and I have been doing in relation to a new branch... probably to become v2. The gist of the effort is that we've been noticing the trend in OpenGL towards some "unification", if I can call it that, of the most recent OpenGL and OpenGL ES specs. Our efforts are geared towards allowing us to take advantage of this trend. I plan to head out to Sweden next month so we can speed up efforts, and hope to have more to say soon. Sorry for the tease. :-/
The other project taking up a large portion of my time lately (and feeding my family) is the continuing development of the Facebook game, Dungeon Overlord. While not working on game features or troubleshooting yet another facebook or amazon pain, Ardor Labs has been building an Android app allowing you to manage your dungeons on the road. The app is nearly done, just waiting for some legal stuff to fall into place. I'm looking forward to its release.
First of all, I'm pretty excited that NASA scientists planning missions for the next generation Mars rover, and reading/using the science it produces, will have Ardor3D under the hood. Rikard and I are working on more terrain improvements for this effort that will make their way into Ardor3D in the next couple of months. The major focus is on terrain+shadow work.
After a lot of delay caused by family matters (crazy how passing ons and new babies put a lot in perspective - and on hold) for both Rikard and myself, a long overdue interview with the Caromble team is coming together. If you are not familiar with the project, I would describe it as Breakout meets Katamari. Do yourself a favor and go check out their site. (And as alluded to above, Rikard's family has added another beautiful baby girl. Send him your congrats!)
Continuing on the Ardor3D front, a commercial game studio that I can not yet name has been contributing a lot recently to Ardor3D by finding areas to improve in animation and general performance. I'm hoping they get out of "silent" mode in the near future so you all can offer your thanks. :) In the meantime, enjoy the tweaks added to trunk.
As a final thought on Ardor3D I'd like to briefly mention the work that Rikard and I have been doing in relation to a new branch... probably to become v2. The gist of the effort is that we've been noticing the trend in OpenGL towards some "unification", if I can call it that, of the most recent OpenGL and OpenGL ES specs. Our efforts are geared towards allowing us to take advantage of this trend. I plan to head out to Sweden next month so we can speed up efforts, and hope to have more to say soon. Sorry for the tease. :-/
The other project taking up a large portion of my time lately (and feeding my family) is the continuing development of the Facebook game, Dungeon Overlord. While not working on game features or troubleshooting yet another facebook or amazon pain, Ardor Labs has been building an Android app allowing you to manage your dungeons on the road. The app is nearly done, just waiting for some legal stuff to fall into place. I'm looking forward to its release.
News for April
Looks like I need to do a little catchup again. Here's the latest tidbits:
Dungeon Overlord - I'll just start off here since this game has taken a lot of my time lately. The game has broken the 100k mark of people who have tried it out which is pretty good considering the very limited advertising done to date. Most of my time has been spent unraveling hibernate snarls and improving performance. I was a server programmer prior to my OpenGL days, and a lot has changed since then so it's been fun catching up. Recent new game additions include new creature abilities, Easter surprises and continuous performance improvements.
Ardor3D - Even though I've been busy with DO lately, Ardor3D has received lovin to a few different systems. Probably most interesting is the addition of VBO support for vertex attributes, greatly increasing our performance when doing things such as gpu skinning. See the updated AnimationDemoExample for a preview. I also have spent time with gDebugger looking for unnecessary gl calls and found one or two also related to shader use. Actually, we also overuse glColor, but before I can eliminate that I need to find all the places that can affect current color. :-/
In addition to shader improvements, we've added a new UI widget (UIComboBox) as well as the ability to render to cubemap textures (dynamic reflections!) Both of these, as usual, can be tested out in the examples. Seems we need to release a 0.8 soon.
In other news, Rikard and I are hoping to announce soon another little project we've been working hard on for the last several months. We're pretty excited about it and I hope you will be too. :)
Dungeon Overlord - I'll just start off here since this game has taken a lot of my time lately. The game has broken the 100k mark of people who have tried it out which is pretty good considering the very limited advertising done to date. Most of my time has been spent unraveling hibernate snarls and improving performance. I was a server programmer prior to my OpenGL days, and a lot has changed since then so it's been fun catching up. Recent new game additions include new creature abilities, Easter surprises and continuous performance improvements.
Ardor3D - Even though I've been busy with DO lately, Ardor3D has received lovin to a few different systems. Probably most interesting is the addition of VBO support for vertex attributes, greatly increasing our performance when doing things such as gpu skinning. See the updated AnimationDemoExample for a preview. I also have spent time with gDebugger looking for unnecessary gl calls and found one or two also related to shader use. Actually, we also overuse glColor, but before I can eliminate that I need to find all the places that can affect current color. :-/
In addition to shader improvements, we've added a new UI widget (UIComboBox) as well as the ability to render to cubemap textures (dynamic reflections!) Both of these, as usual, can be tested out in the examples. Seems we need to release a 0.8 soon.
In other news, Rikard and I are hoping to announce soon another little project we've been working hard on for the last several months. We're pretty excited about it and I hope you will be too. :)
Ardor3D and jinngine
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| Ardor3D & jinngine |
For a recent support task I was asked to help with integrating some kind of physics system and Ardor3D. After having played around in the source code of Rikard's ArdorCraft - Galaxies I really started liking the simplicity of the jinngine physics engine. While still a little rough around the edges, it's stable and simple to use. For the support task, I put together a little demo app, which you can see in the picture to the right. Try it out here (requires Java 1.6 and an OpenGL 1.2 capable graphics card.)
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