Introduction
In this chapter we will give a short overview of the history
of this project and describe the feature set and scope of this
tool.
History of Moonlight
Moonlight|3D is a project with a long and winding history.
Development of the first program with that name started out
in 1996, but since then the team has changed and the
development has been restarted from scratch twice since then
for various reasons.
Stephane Rehel started out development of the initial version
of Moonlight, probably in the year 1996. The date of the first
is currently unknown. Development of this first version of that
program went on by the original team went on until the year 2000.
In that year, Stephane Rehel started a series of releases that
came without source code and later in the same year the project
homepage suddenly disappeared. Development suddenly came to a full
halt.
Then nothing of interest happend until December 2001. A small note
in a community forum suggested that the development of the tool
could continue without the orignal authors starting from the last
release that came with source code. The reaction to this proposal
was quite positive and Moonlight Resurrected project was spawned.
However, the early enthusiasm soon turned into frustration over
the inability to understand and maintain the codebase of Moonlight.
This development effort stopped by the end of 2002, when it was
decided to restart from scratch.
This decision triggered a long, winding design discussion that
went until mid 2003, when the first code, again in C++, started
to appear. Although the project kept the name Moonlight, it now
aimed for something technically very different from the original
program. The main focus now was to build a technical base for
a 3D modelling and animation tool that allowed to keep a
fine-grained history of modelling steps that would remain editable
and ultimately even animateable. With that change, the project
entered a phase of long and utter silence. Silently, the
development would move on, slowly but steadily, until problems
started to accumulate by the end of 2004.
By this time, the program was about to reach a state where it would
soon become actually usable and a first technical preview release
would become possible. However, a lot of problems appeared almost
instantaneously. The increasing frustration these problems caused
led Gregor Mueckl to try and port the code and design to Java.
This sudden change in development led to the death of the new
C++ code base and prompted another restart, this time with all
the power and easiness of development that Java brings with it.
Quite some code and most of the concepts were salvaged from
the C++ code, so this new attempt moved forward at a much higher
pace. By the end of October 2005, the first release of the all-new
Moonlight|3D, now entirely written in Java, appeared. This was
also the first time in 3 long years that the project reappeared
in the public.
Feature overview
Give a short overview of the capabilites of this program.