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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."
And here in two seconds, the slashdot effect will make sure nobody on the internet can tell the difference.
Ow, I bruised my bandwidth!
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jonathan barket
We got Blender3d now. Why revive old corpses and divide the community again?
Yeah! Who needs choice? Screw that shit!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
, 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"?
Why oh why bring back something form 2 years ago, especially when there is the blender3d project already out there... why not add to blender3d? Why waste resources competing with an opensource project? You have nothing to gain, if you don't like it's functionality, re-write it... don't create a whole new software... that's just re-inventing the wheel (to the next level).
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I wanted live-action, photo-realistic rendering of my friend during his football game.
So, rather than using a digital camera, I made the smart (and obvious) choice to have an art student draw some scenes onto a 3'x6' cow carcass with a palette of 16 different paints.
In hindsight, seeing how she intuitively grasped the essential elements and pared the decision tree makes me glad that I left my Canon at home!
EricKrout.com
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
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.
well, in terms of features, Moonlight isn't as complete yet
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
maybe some stuff like choice could be brought in to the discussion as well...
You misunderstood. Let me elaborate further.
Since developers allocate time out of their schedules and donate their skills (for free) to a project that powers the engine which essentially drives the open source movement. Blender3d was just freed. It's not a perfect 3d Modeling Suite by any means. It will be months, even years before it can reach the same playing field where discreet and Alias dominate the game.
Moonlight project was killed. Seems to me we got a negative charge within the OSS community where they try to counter each and every project with a similar initiative, and in turn it just divides the developers into two camps and never gives edge to a single one.
Suppose someone countered MS Exchange with an Open Source solution. I bet 3 days later there would be 2 different open source projects on freshmeat in a competition. Why? The first one isn't perfect yet!
To me the logical step would be to perfect something first, rather than have 2 half assed-solutions.
I read the comments... everything is either off-topic or refers to the article negatively...
I'm puzzled. What's up? Could it be that I--!! QUICK! Scroll to the top again! YES! I foolishly turned off my "michael" filter!
A quick trip to my preferences prevents this mishap in the future. Now.. must turn off third person narrative... ...
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!
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
I played about with Moonlight 3D some time ago and found it far easier to use then Blender 3D.
To me, the user interface was quite simply far more user friendly then Blender is. (Of course, that is a matter of opinion and that is my opinion.)
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
O(n) describes how the processing time of a problem increases when more elements are put into the input set. For example, O(n) means that when you add 1 to the input set, you add 1 to the number of loops at runtime.
O(2^n) means that for each element you put into the input set, the number of loops doubles. Thus, while an input set with 3 elements in it would loop 8 times, an input set with 4 elements would loop 16, etc. The number gets unmanageable fast - 10 elements = 1024 loops, 20 elements = 1048576 loops, 100 elements = 1267650600228229401496703205376 loops. Basically, it means that for any significant amount of data, don't expect it to be finished in your lifetime.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
From the development page:
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
Moonlight|3D isn't dead, it just smells funny.
must.. avoid.. lameness.. filter...
Moonlight 3D is a 3D animation program which simulates a romantic walk of a geek(that's you and me) with a beautiful woman under the moonlight.
It provides:
1) pond simulation(for breaking the ice commenting on that frog you stepped on)
2) real star maps(so you can count stars while she fells asleep)
3) nice seats for sitting romantically holding hands(not to say that you're broke, of course)
4) no dangers from people with green hair(of course you have not been in the gym lately, due to that school project)
The 3d suite's previous name was 'geekdream', but the author changed it for political reasons.
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."
If I see one more checkboard or curved mirror surface on "art" generated by a raytracing program I _will_ kill someone.
Bah, KDE vs. Gnome? That's not a religious battle.
Vi vs. Emacs, now -that's- a religious battle! All other software-of-choice religious battles pale in comparison.
[Checks off 'Step One' for his insane plan to solve the world energy crisis by generating a flamewar about flamewars.]
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
to paraphrase the old saying "you can please all the people some of the time or some of the people all the time" -- asking for *the one* (product here) will never work, because some people will be dissatisfied no matter what. and in the OSS world, some people that aren't happy with the current situation take it upon themselves to provide an alternative they do like. asking everyone to like the same thing will never happen. it never has. so, even though it may seem that competition wastes alot of energy, i think it keeps everything fresh. besides, projects that try to do everything turn into ungodly behemoths and then the people that like it quick and simple end up splintering off anyhow. competition is inevitable, so choose sides and help out! :)
I am not often critical. Well OK, I am almost always critical. So to criticize this article I will say that the editors need to pick up a basic journalism text. If you did so you would notice that one of the canonical rules of good journalistic prose is to let the reader know what the piece is about in the first sentence. Nowhere in the entire posting does it mention what Moonlight 3D actually IS!!!! Before posting please proof read the content and ask yourself some simple questions; does the article in question clearly state the who, what, where, when, and why of the story? News is meant to inform, not send the reader off on a wild hyperlink-hunt and search engine expedition in order to figure out what the story is about. I read Slashdot because (I hope) it will present information that is of interest to me in a fairly concise, easy to read format, saving me from having to spend a lot of time hunting for the information myself. Please present articles that have the most important point right in the very beginning, and then fill in the expository details later. That way people can get the gist of a story with a quick glance, and those that want more detail can stick around for the juicy details. Pick up any decent newspaper for examples. It's quite simple really.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:
It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D (a great open source modeller based on Nendo gives you a complete Open Source animation package.
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.