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."

Comments

What. Is. It.

[rschwa]

, 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

Re:KDE and Gnome all over again

[Sabbath.sCm]

But the real point is, would KDE be so feature-rich and stable if GNOME wasn't there? Competition speeds up evolution, I think.

Re:Description?

[Azghoul]

Just curious, aside from branding, what the hell does "Excel" have to do with anything?

Or "Mozilla"? Or "350Z" :-D

Don't whine about a lack of descriptive names in OSS. They're everywhere.

Re:I don't get people sometimes...

[TitusC3v5]

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.

Documentation

[Screaming Lunatic]

For some constructive criticism. We can bitch and complain about Blender vs Moonlight and how it's KDE vs. Gnome (pick your favorite religous battle) all over again. The bottom line is that Linux needs an OpenSource 3D modelling package.

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

Re:because...

[FreeUser]

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.