My blog has been dead silent lately. The reason for this is that I'm quite busy getting a new release of Balder out the door. 

For the upcoming release, which will be named 0.8.8 – still in Alpha mode, I've focused a lot on code quality and getting some debt paid back from the "early" days when I started the project. But fear not, there is also a bunch of new features coming.

To mention a few things:

– Mouse interaction with objects, an event model

– Simpler initialization – in fact, there is none

– A better declarative Xaml model that replicates the object model found in Core – they are separated, due to cross-platform support that will come.

– The ability to have more than one displays – great for Silverlight when you want to have multiple 3D models on the same page, but not interacting with each other

– Command support – so one can actually do MVVM style 

– Debug information – bounding spheres 

 In addition there is tons of bug fixes, such as:

– Coordinate system was out of wack. Positive Y was pointing downards, now pointing up

– Initialization bugs that occured from time to time

– Speedups – rendering pipeline has optimized a tad, and the initialization phase as well.

There are a few breaking changes there as well in the API – its gotten a bit cleaner and more concise.

A detailed description of all this will come in the release notes.   Keep your ears to the ground, cool stuff will come soon.