It is the sweltering summer in the city of Austin and it has been a long time since a blog update. Let's play a little catchup with a little Q&A:
Q: Why no blog posts for six months?
A: Well, aside from my usual battery of stress - work, open source, school classes, family, church, etc. - I was hard at work helping some friends in Sweden (Rikard Herlitz for example) put together a new WebGL product... a Java and GWT based engine that's showing a lot of promise for putting together games, visualizations, and lots more. The engine is called "Goo Engine". (You can see more on it over at gooengine.com.) We were keeping it fairly quiet since we did not have a lot of fun demos to show (and our best demos are still not public since they use customer assets :-/) so I didn't have much to talk about.
Q: Is Goo Engine a successor to Ardor3D?
A: No, not really. Obviously since Rikard and I are working on it, it builds off of our previous experience, but so far it is meant primarily as a vehicle for commercial products and not something that is being released itself (so no, not open source.)
Q: Will you be spending all of your time on this new product?
A: I will spend some time helping them move it forward, but now that we've mostly got it running smoothly, I've handed Sweden (international business deals are so complex!) any reins I was holding so I can move on to the next thing.
Q: Which is...?
A: I'm not sure yet. :-) Something involving 3D, maybe work on a game. I am open to suggestions! I could probably use some more contract work though. ;-)
Q: Any plans for Ardor3D?
A: I'm planning to move the code base to git and googlecode soon and then look to move us quickly to v1.0. I don't anticipate a lot of feature additions along the way though, aside from making the Jogl2.0 renderer official. So sorry if you had a feature request in - I'm personally ready to move on to a new code base instead, (Ardor3D v2?). I am hoping git will better facilitate feature additions and bug fixes to 1.0 from the community.
Q: What else has been going on?
A: Our son Alexander was born a few days after my last post and he's already moving around the house getting into trouble. Also, I finally finished the schooling I was taking on the side to finish up my bachelor's degree... that's right, I started it back in NYC in '98 or so at Columbia University, but 9/11 and a new baby prompted us to move out of the city. While I haven't needed it so far in life, it's nice to have.
I've also just got back from a two week break and feeling recharged and ready to get back into things. If I've missed your emails or posts... I'm trying to catch up now.
