Ardor3D releases 0.5

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 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.

(see the rest of the release notes on the forums.)

VBO and Display List

Ardor3D's next release is coming up soon and among the last few tasks we've been brushing up is proper Vertex Buffer Object and Display List support. For VBO, this new release will see the removal of the old (unsupported) VBOInfo class and instead will offer an inherited flag for signaling whether a particular branch should use Arrays, VBO (one per buffer) or interleaved VBO (one buffer containing vertices, normals, etc.) VBO ids are now tracked per GL context (so are textures now, yay!) so you can take a single scenegraph and render it in multiple canvases, even if those canvases have different GL contexts.

Display Lists are a different beast. We've found in the past that display lists, especially if used naively, can often be slower than just using VBO. As you might know, we long ago chopped off jME's lock() methods which generated a display list of mesh data (and possibly transforms) per leaf of your scenegraph. In 0.5, Ardor3D will have a tool called SceneCompiler that enables the programmer to do things such as compile an entire branch of your scenegraph (states and all) to a single display list. This tool will likely grow beyond just making display lists to also include various other things such as similar mesh combining.

Note that we're still making several tweaks (you can follow along in our hintdev branch and make comments in the forum) and of course as people start using 0.5 I imagine it will evolve quite a bit more.

Keep watching this space for the release announcement (expected within a week or two.)