Ardor3D is a free and open source, Java based 3D engine brought to you by Joshua "Renanse" Slack and Rikard "MrCoder" Herlitz (formerly developers of the jMonkeyEngine.)  Ardor3D began life as a fork of jME with the goal of making a more professionally oriented engine with a community based on accepted open source principles.

Requirements:

· Java

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

What's new:
· New CPU/GPU capable skeletal skinning framework.
· TextureClipMap (Megatexture) for use in Terrain or other geometry texturing.
· Ardor3D based UI System
· Completely rewritten Collada Importer - now much more functional and no longer requires JiBX.
· 3D Math functions (noise, fbm, etc.) and utilities for visualizing these as procedural textures or height-maps.
· BloomRenderPass, allowing simple addition of a "bloom" effect.
· Much improved, automatic resource cleanup - now handles detection of GPU referenced items being gc'd and automatically removes them from the card for you.
· Basic support for applets in place.


API Improvements / Changes:
· Terrain system now supports non-wrapping terrain, terrain transformations, improved fog, user definable height ranges and user initiated height-map updates.
· Water use "Oblique near frustum clipping" instead of OpenGL clip-planes to enable clipping on objects with shaders and has the ability to blur reflections.
· Terrain and Water now work a lot nicer together (see TerrainWaterExample)
· FBO texture rendering now supports multi-sample.
· Curve-based transform controllers for smooth character/camera control.
· ResourceLocator system now uses an extensible ResourceSource interface for finding resources.
· Transparency render type hint added allowing control over one and two pass transparency rendering from within the Scene itself.
· Game task queues now ref'd by Object instead of RenderContext allowing for custom or cross context queues.
· AwtCanvas is now split into jogl and lwjgl versions to disconnect ardor3d-awt from an lwjgl dependency.
· Shadow system now supports directional lights and casting shadows through alpha test enabled textures.
· Shadow system now respects Mesh flag "castsShadows"
· Older shadow systems have now been dropped in favor of our PSSM implementation.
· Texture's "blendColor" field renamed to "constantColor" to more accurately reflect use.
· Added image loader for Ardor3D binary format (.abi)
· Added ability to update the face of an existing cube map texture via the renderer.
· Support added to the Renderer for setting scissor area.
· Now supports compilation on OpenSolaris
· Now supports Solaris SWT in maven config
· Lots of javadoc and comments added.
· Lots of other small API tweaks and cleanup.


Bugs Addressed:
· Fixed bug in AWT that prevented grabbed from working properly.
· Bounding transforms now correctly apply non-rotational matrices properly from the Transform class.
· Fixed full screen mode issues happening on some Linux distros.
· Fixed bug in Transform.getGLApplyMatrix where matrix was missing a "1" at 3, 3
· Fixed bug in Texture state texGen application where wrong mode might be set.
· Fixed bug in Triangle class where point A was returned for getB and getC.