This release of Moonlight|3D adds basic support for animations. It is now possible to animate virtually any object property using keyframes. Also, Moonlight|3D can have an unlimited number of animation tracks in each scene. This will serve as the basis for many future features including non-linear animation. Naturally, animated sequences created with Moonlight|3D can be rendered in full or in part into sequences of image files using the new Render Animation feature.

Moonlight|3D also gained a new tool named Split Face which cuts mesh faces into halves along a line through two user-selected vertices. Furthermore, the Delete Objects, Delete Vertices, Delete Edges and Delete Faces tools have been unified into a new, much more convenient Delete Selection tool.

Other minor areas of the user interface have changed as well: The property sheets finally show much more meaningful labels and limit the number of digits that are displayed for floating point values to a handleable amount. Furthermore, there is now a new colour selection dialog which also provides the possibility to select alpha values. Future releases will extend the dialog to include additional colour space representations to make colour selection even more intuitive.

The way in which Moonlight|3D manages its mesh data internally has been changed greatly in this release to reduce memory usage on big polygon meshes and to help gain performance when processing these. While this has already lead to noticeable performance improvements in some situations there are still some tools which do not yet profit from these changes yet and actually have taken a performance hit in this release. We will gradually improve this with upcoming releases and expect to see considerable improvements.

Version 0.2.0 of Moonlight|3D is available for Linux and Windows from the downloads page.

This release marks the start of the 0.2.x series of releases in which development will focus on three areas: animations, mesh editing performance and improved support for materials and texturing.

The Moonlight Application Framework has seen some improvements and bug fixes since the last release. These are:

• new colour dialog
• property sheets are now implemented as a plugin
• support for alternate label texts in property sheet definitions
• support for alternate sets of default property editor factories for specific property sheet instances
• complete Hungarian transation (contributed by Gaàl Gergely)
• complete German transation

The Moonlight Application Framework 0.1.2 is available as source code for download here.