This is Moonlight|3D, a 3D modelling and rendering program. It is entirely written in Java. See below for instructions to run the program. Early development release warning --------------------------------- Please note that this is a very early development release and what is implemented is only a tiny fraction of the things that are still meant to come. This also implies that the program clearly lacks features, may contain numerous bugs, potentially even quite severe ones and there is no guarantee that later versions of Moonlight|3D will be able to handle files created with this specific version of this program. In other words: Use this program at your own risk. Don't use it for serious or important work because you may not be able to finish it because of bugs you encounter and/or you may not be able to open the scenes you created with newer versionso of this program. You can't hold us responsible for any amount of work you lose because of this. You have been warned. Prerequisites ------------- Although the program is written in Java, it contains third party components that come as platform specific native libraries. This means that Moonlight|3D is only officially supported on the following platforms: Linux/x86 Linux/x86_64 (only with a 32 bit Java VM at the moment) Windows/x86 Moonlight|3D might run on other platforms as well, but this has not been tested and the developers cannot activly support them at the moment. Additionally, you need to have Java 1.5 or higher installed. If you have more than one Java installation on your system please verify that you are running a version that is current enough by running the command java -version and reviewing the program output. Moonlight|3D will not run with any older versions of the Java runtime. Please note that Moonlight|3D was only tested with the JREs and JDKs provided by Sun Microsystems. Correct functionality on other Java VMs is not guaranteed. We would like to hear about your experiences with other VMs. Installation ------------ Currently there is no way to perform a system wide installation of Moonlight|3D. In order to use the program, extract the downloaded archive to the directory where you want the program to reside. Please do not extract Moonlight|3D into a path that contains spaces because this currently causes issues at program startup. Moonlight|3D does not depend on write access to its installation directory, so it might be possible to share an installation between multiple users on a system. However, this has not been tested and is not encouraged at the time. Running Moonlight|3D -------------------- Moonlight|3D can be run in interactive mode with a full user interface or in batch mode. To run Moonlight|3D in interactive mode, open a command shell, change into the directory into which you extracted the program archive. On Linux, use the command ./moonlight.sh to start the program. On Windows it is sufficient to double-click the supplied batch file moonlight.bat. To run Moonlight|3D in batch mode, use the command ./mlbatch.sh [script file] [script arguments] or mlbatch [script file] [script arguments] on Linux or Windows, respectively. Be sure to supply a script file to be executed or Moonlight|3D will exit with only an error message. The program does not need any graphical user interface in batch mode which means that it can be run safely from text only terminals or remote ssh connections, if that is desired. It is possible to add the Moonlight|3D directory to your PATH variable and to start the program from arbitrary directories, but this has not been tested extensively and thus is not recommended. Support and User community -------------------------- The program website is located at http://www.moonlight3d.eu and the support and user forum is located at http://www.moonlight3d.eu/forum. This is a great place to ask for help if you run into trouble with this program. Also feel free to report on your experiences with the program and your ideas for improvements there.