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.