Ardor3D L4D2

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

Ardor3D releases 0.6

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.

Skinning - first cut

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:

Terrain Example

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