Jad Engine 1.1 Released
It's been a long time, but at last it's here. After a RC in the Jad Engine forums and some last hour bug-fixing, today we release Jad Engine 1.1. For the Jade Team is a great moment as this release has sucked a lot of our free time in the last months. It's more stable, faster and better organized that Jade 1.0. I must say it's my mistake not having a proper changelog, so I'll copy the "new features" text from the 1.1 Readme.txt:
"Apart from a very big list of changes and fixes, the most important new features in Jade 1.1 are:
- Jade Binary Format: Jade now has its own binary format to load and save scenes. This format is meant to be used when deploying a game, as it will offer very fast load times.
- Input: Jade's input system was rewritten, and it's now scriptable.
- Scripting: Jade supports now scripting in Boo, C# and VB.NET.
- Virtual File System: Jade now has a virtual file system (VFS) used to query for files and load resources into the engine from different sources via one simplyfied interface. It supports package files and comes with a visual tool to create and manage them.
- Collada Importer: the main format for Jade will be Collada, so there's now a tool that allows you to load Collada files into Jade. This feature is in beta state.
- Animation Support: there's now support for morphing animation in Jade. Also, the basics for skeletal animation are there, but they need a little more work. This feature is also in beta state."
Believe me the list of fixes and new minor features is very big (like multiple viewports, math improvements,...) ;) The main features are also pretty important for the engine future, and it's here where we have failed a little with this release: due to real life matters (one dev had to leave the project), we haven't been able to finish the Collada and Animation parts. They are mostly done, but they aren't in a usable state yet. I know a lot of people would like to see these features in the engine, and I can tell that we would love to see them in the engine also, but at the moment we lack the knowledge on those subjects to finish them properly, but we are searching solutions for the subject (if you feel interested in helping, drop an email to jadengine AT gmail DOT com).
Apart from that "dark point", we have tried to make an effort on the documentation area on this release, so we have added several new tutorials and several new docs for starters. I would invite you specially to check the "Jad Engine Quickstart Guide" from Jesse A. Jimenez, as it makes a great job teaching the basics of Jade.
You can grab the 1.1 release here:
http://www.codeplex.com/JADENGINE/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2841
Feel free to post your oppinions about Jade 1.1 here, or better in our forums ;) We hope you enjoy this new release as much as we enjoyed coding it. Now time to work on 1.2!