tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87901832010-07-23T17:28:44.479-05:00Updates and commentary from the depths of a 3d Java code spinner's mind.Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.comBlogger239125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-26289717420142418112010-07-23T17:06:00.003-05:002010-07-23T17:28:44.487-05:002010-07-23T17:28:44.487-05:00

So during my work here at NASA JPL these last two weeks, I've been integrating Ardor3D, streaming clipmap-based terrain and a Wii controller into an Eclipse RCP application for viewing on a 3/4 round CAVE projection screen. Things have gone very smoothly, with the exception of one head-scratcher that stopped us in our tracks when moving from a standard Ardor canvas to the RCP application. We

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-8518141436752951972010-07-10T16:21:00.000-05:002010-07-10T16:21:31.515-05:002010-07-10T16:21:31.515-05:00

Quick update... Ardor3D's Android binding has been improved to avoid unnecessarily scaling bitmap resources, reducing some extra memory usage and startup/load times. Specifically, we are using BitmapFactory.Options to disable automatic scaling during bitmap loading, and allowing you to optionally pass your own options to the bitmap loader. More Android items should come over the next few weeks

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-21074861160539945572010-07-03T10:29:00.000-05:002010-07-03T10:29:29.058-05:002010-07-03T10:29:29.058-05:00

Latest alpha ardor3d-android is up now with fixes related to froyo. It appears that (at least on Nexus One handsets) that trying to use user clip planes (even just the 1 it claims to support) will throw an enum exception... so that functionality is disabled for now. Grab it here. Box example (apk) here.

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-66890415138406125312010-07-02T11:53:00.002-05:002010-07-02T11:55:56.051-05:002010-07-02T11:55:56.051-05:00

The last week or two has been pretty crazy, first getting the Android sdk out to the public and then helping push out massive terrain improvements (kudos goes to Rikard for the biggest share of that) and integrate them for a NASA project. My apologies to those waiting for fixes, feedback, or such from me... I am back for a week or two and will be hitting as many requests as I can before the next

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-69495664893221433612010-06-22T20:55:00.001-05:002010-06-22T20:56:37.125-05:002010-06-22T20:56:37.125-05:00

Congratulations to the three finalists in the Ardor3D Mobile Summer Event! They are: Retro Pocket Games Xplorers StoryEmber 3D While these folks may be excited to get paid to work on their idea, I'm personally just happy to have 3 teams helping us push our new android binding towards a stable, usable release. :) Come join us on the forums and cheer them on, or if you are brave, start your own

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-51348241503058607302010-06-04T22:47:00.001-05:002010-06-04T22:47:20.451-05:002010-06-04T22:47:20.451-05:00

The rules are up and the forum is ready for entries! Looking forward to seeing your creations listed there.

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-75093599649013702122010-05-31T11:09:00.001-05:002010-05-31T11:10:45.518-05:002010-05-31T11:10:45.518-05:00

Ardor Labs is looking for a Java programmer to help us keep up with our workload. The position would be here in Austin, Texas and involves Java Servlets, Hibernate, Hudson, MySQL and probably some Ardor3D coding as well. We're looking for a "junior" person due to budget, but could arrange a part time contract position for someone more senior. Check out our Craig's List posting for more details

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-77049362422601240002010-05-29T17:53:00.001-05:002010-05-30T10:23:55.268-05:002010-05-30T10:23:55.268-05:00

For a while now we've been talking about an upcoming summer "contest" for the Ardor3D community, with details to come in May. Rikard and I thought long and hard on this. Our goals were to help our community members to learn new and useful skills, foster greater community participation, and of course generate more interest and attention for the technology. In the end, we decided rather than

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-11489140409729054572010-04-15T21:23:00.003-05:002010-04-16T16:59:40.722-05:002010-04-16T16:59:40.722-05:00

Parts 1 and 2 on the new Ardor3D Animation Features covered nearly everything you need to know, so we'll wrap it up by discussing a few loose ends. First, let's talk about weights.  When you put together states and layers, you'll likely use a weight based blending to bring together multiple sources.  For state transitions, the weighting is mostly out of your hands as it is time-based, but for

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-31137966012700561332010-04-10T10:21:00.003-05:002010-04-10T13:00:18.511-05:002010-04-10T13:00:18.511-05:00

In the last post, we looked at how our new animation system adds animation states and a finite state machine to enable simpler handling of character animation.  This is good, but what if we need the character to be doing two things at once... say walking and pointing at something of interest.  We'd either need to have states for all possible combinations of behavior (yikes, and probably not

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-59561052003905672072010-04-08T17:46:00.001-05:002010-04-10T10:21:54.461-05:002010-04-10T10:21:54.461-05:00

Recently added to Ardor3D's animation project are several new features to give you more options and ease of use with your animated characters. First it might be helpful to look at what we already had in our first feature set.  The first cut of animation system had an animation manager that held a blend tree and a skeleton pose to apply it to.  You would set a manager up per unique animated model

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-47647836822342173902010-03-27T09:58:00.003-05:002010-03-28T11:09:44.132-05:002010-03-28T11:09:44.132-05:00

For a long time now, we've avoided using the benefits first offered by Java 6 in Ardor3D. For the most part, they were small things... a useful method here and there. We stayed with version 5 partially because 6 was still fairly new and there were certain platforms (Mac, I'm looking at you) where it was a challenge to get a working copy. Java 6 has now been out on Windows and Linux for over

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-53589202632262581162010-03-22T23:11:00.003-05:002010-03-27T00:59:13.511-05:002010-03-27T00:59:13.511-05:00

Yes I know the time has well passed, but I've had these unbox photos sitting around for a while waiting to go up... If you only look at one, see the last one. ;)

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-60498918205971228272010-03-21T10:31:00.005-05:002010-03-22T22:40:13.515-05:002010-03-22T22:40:13.515-05:00

I do most of my Ardor3D programming (and before that, jME) on a Mac under OSX and have long wondered why jogl performed so much slower than lwjgl there.  In troubleshooting, the only difference I noticed was that under jogl, I was taxing my cpu a lot less.  That, and if I took the ratio of difference in CPU usage and multiplied it against the jogl frame rate, I would get something close to the

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-68769070369705933572010-02-09T21:24:00.000-06:002010-02-09T21:24:37.512-06:002010-02-09T21:24:37.512-06:00

Seems like lately (and especially since the arrival of the Nexus One,) everyone and their dog wants to jump on the Android platform.  From my own experience porting a chunk of jMonkeyEngine over to Android a couple of years ago, and a certain subsequent Android project after that, I have to believe this is a good thing.  The platform has matured a lot since those early release candidates and is

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-6170321273808347522010-02-02T11:59:00.002-06:002010-03-22T22:16:51.887-05:002010-03-22T22:16:51.887-05:00

Work continues forward as usual at Ardor Labs, most recently with various interesting projects in Animation and other areas related to Ardor3D.  As a side project though, I've been spending some time with my three brothers knocking together a remake of the old Lode Runner game.  For my brothers (I'm the eldest) I hope it's an interesting experience in game design and programming.  For me, it's

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-67679505010320954932010-01-20T13:31:00.000-06:002010-01-20T13:31:23.511-06:002010-01-20T13:31:23.511-06:00

So last night my 1TB Apple Time Capsule shut off, never to turn on again.  I'm not exactly sure how long I've had it, but probably in the neighborhood of 18 months or so... which jives well with stats I've found around the net.  I'm very disappointed with Apple and what was supposed to be a "highly reliable" backup solution.  Seems in the interests of aesthetics, they decided to ignore certain

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-30080978650741724882009-12-31T23:20:00.000-06:002009-12-31T23:20:43.774-06:002009-12-31T23:20:43.774-06:00

May the year ahead bring each of us further down those paths whereon our hopes and hearts lie.  Best wishes!

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-4720786125336037462009-12-20T22:10:00.004-06:002009-12-20T22:18:00.071-06:002009-12-20T22:18:00.071-06:00

As a little after-hours project, Rikard and I have been helping out a team who needed a "planetary evolution" display for some exhibit over in Europe. The idea is to evoke a sense of wonder at how many possible planets there are out there, and that they've been evolving over millions of years, etc. As a volunteer side project, we were only able to put a small portion of our time towards it, but

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-44573422847292215682009-11-26T12:22:00.008-06:002010-03-22T22:51:09.855-05:002010-03-22T22:51:09.855-05:00

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

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-40110907740519659772009-11-21T14:46:00.004-06:002009-11-21T14:48:37.791-06:002009-11-21T14:48:37.791-06:00

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

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-34939052956542855532009-11-13T15:48:00.003-06:002009-11-13T16:27:57.647-06:002009-11-13T16:27:57.647-06:00

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

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-81579918753701594352009-11-02T16:12:00.003-06:002009-11-04T15:39:02.374-06:002009-11-04T15:39:02.374-06:00

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

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-29488951176625882872009-10-28T15:19:00.004-05:002009-10-28T15:43:32.107-05:002009-10-28T15:43:32.107-05:00

Among other work projects, I've been able to get into animation systems this week - and I feel comfortable promising that you will see a lot of progress for Ardor3D there over the next 2-3 months! :)Since Petter (who wrote the stubs and code currently sitting in ardor3d-animations) has stepped away from us for a while due to family and job/commute pressures, I've decided to start fresh, using the

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790183.post-29225194832564955662009-10-09T10:00:00.003-05:002009-10-09T10:21:07.078-05:002009-10-09T10:21:07.078-05:00

Yet another rumor to add weight to the possible demise of JavaOne... An article entitled "Sun management stumbled on EU Oracle probe" on The Register is claiming they have "learned that there will be no more JavaOne conferences under the new Oracle owner."Until Oracle comes out and confirms this (assuming the Oracle-Sun deal goes through) it's all still anyone's guess. Personally however I

Josh Slackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15896461050886104953noreply@blogger.com0