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Moonlight|3D 0.5.5 Released
oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german,
french,
italian and
spanish."
It'd be nice if there was so info in the press release about WHAT THE HELL THIS THING IS
, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function
You're joking, right?
How hard is it to say "Moonlight, the window manager", or "Moonlight, the animated series", or "Moonlight, the new journalling file system" in these posts?
I don't even bother clicking these links because the server is going to be buried anyway.
..another waste of posting space
I saw a post just the other day from somebody complaining about the lack of descriptive names in OSS projects. Here's a good example.
Moonlight 3D. It's obviously related to 3D in some way. Is it a modeller, raytracing engine, game, scientific 3D analysis, 3D star map maybe? Give one sentence at least. Don't make me go read the damn article to figure out if I'm even interested in reading about it.
Now I've gone an had to follow the link to find out it's a modeller/renderer. You couldn't say "Moonlight 3D modeller/renderer released"?
A choice between a $1500 3D Studio and a Free Blender3D, not between two redundant blenders
Blender being GPL'd was aboslutely newsworthy. Why is Moonlight's resurrection newsworthy? A program sits around a long time, it gets an update, front page news on slashdot. Aside from the possibility that the author/team has a friend in the slashdot editors, this just doesn't seem to belong on the front page at all. Many, many programs are inactive for a long time, then someone (sometimes the original author) comes along and updates it.
But the real point is, would KDE be so feature-rich and stable if GNOME wasn't there? Competition speeds up evolution, I think.
Because Confucius say "Choice is good."
Seriously, though, why not? Yes, we have Blender, but we also have over a dozen window managers. Open source is about choice - if you like something stick with it. People tend to get all up in arms about KDE and Gnome, but it's easy to see that without each other, neither would have pressed to reach the level of functionality that both have attained at this point.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
I have downloaded the source to both Blender and Moonlight. And I'm still banging my head to figure out how to compile and run the darn things. What these projects need is some good documentation and developers jumping on board working out features.
So who's with me? Here I go to join the dev maillist
Do we really need another 3D suit?
:-)
:-) I'm not saying this will happen for Moonlight, but anything is possible. Besides, choice is a good thing and to me the different focuses of Blender and Moonlight are signifigant enough to not pull out the "you're reinventing the wheel" card.
The users of Moonlight 3D will decide the answer to that question.
While it is noble to undertake writing a 3D suit, is it prudent to attempt to rewrite something that had already been written by 1999? To work on a project that is leagues behind the professional suits and that for all intents and purposes will most likely never be used in a professional setting?
Who's to say what will become of Moonlight 3d in the future? I'm sure people didn't think much would come of Linus' little side project either but look what happened.
Blender is a scan line renderer w/a real time engine and animation capabilities w/an efficient but arcane UI.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer w/a nice interface and decent nurbs, curve functionality
Hopefully these two projects will be able to learn and feed off of one another's progress (esp since they're both GPL) and both projects will be better off in the end!
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Shame on you guys! You think one tool is all anyone would ever need? Look at mainstream computer graphics market. How many 3D modeling and animation applications are there? ONE?!? I don't THINK so. Last time I checked, there were five or six major animation packages, and about a dozen more minor ones. Cut it down to modeling only, and you've got another half dozen or so. Diversity is what we're all about, whether it's open source or not.
Ah, but does blender have a raytracer (as opposed to scanline tracing) and a nice UI? Thought not.
Well then please oh please do NOT move to Linux. We like our choice.. stick to what's made for you.
Windows is designed for comformity. And since you appear to be a big fan of conformity and all that it entails (lack of choice, no personal expression allowed.. art == bad etc.) please stay where you are and where you belong.
Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.
Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!
As a Blender fan (who has purchased books from NaN in the past and donated some money toward freeing the source) I can only agree.
My hope is that any and all of the free 3d modelling and rendering projects will get together on the data side, either using standards (e.g. renderman format) or agreeing on a common format to use as a lingua franca. Ideally one should be able to do portions of their project in Blender, portions in povray, portions in Moonlight 3D, and so on. If history is any guide, each of these projects will have its strengths and weaknesses, and allowing them all to interact (at least at the data level) smoothly would be a huge boon to all of the projects in question.
Of course, having them all be able to provide 'expert components' for their areas of strength to some kind of a meta (or ueber) 3d authoring suite is probably too much to ask at this stage, but not too much to dream of and perhaps work toward down the road.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What if a person has very in depth knowledge of the inner workings of Moonlight|3D, but not Blender3D, and has ideas about computer graphics that s/he wants to implement, and would rather spend the time actually coding the implementation rather than trying to figure out how Blender3D works.
Any actual working implementation of an idea is a lot better than vapourware, and its easier to implement something with tools you already understand how to use.
It's all about choice, really.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
why does it exist?
- because some stupid guy did not take the sources of blender in 1996 or so when he started moonlight
- because some other stupid guys liked moonlight and used it
- because it's easier to cope with without learning yet-another-GUI-paradigm
- because it's fun hacking it (blender doesn't even build yet afaik)
- because blender sources weren't free in january, when I started
- and finally, because I guess that the blender sources are much bigger and less understandable than source that was once meant to be open instead of some corporate beast that wasn't supposed to see the light
- and because you are one cool dude
Seriously, let me say, um, 5 things: 1) Thanks a lot for doing this 2) Congratulations on your release 3) Keep it up 4) The glass angel is gorgeous! 5) Please ignore the clueless dickheads who probably never coded anything in their lives and never contributed to any project, yet think they know who should work on which project and why.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.