----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Originally posted by me in the online forums of the Web3D Consortium.Originally titled: RawKee 0.4 ReleasedMay 16, 2005http://www.web3d.org/----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Well, this week I finally released version 0.4 of RawKee. It was a long road to get there, and about 2 months overdue.I'm very pleased that RawKee now runs on OSX. Other than the direct.h include required for Windows, there are only three lines of code that differentiate the different platform versions. So now we have versions for Win and OSX, and though we haven't tested it yet, we think that the current source code will also build for Linux and IRIX. Hopefully, we'll be able to make an attempt at building those two platforms soon.It turns out though that 0.4 has a pretty serious bug in it, but it only shows up if the content author is sloppy with his/her modeling. By some bizarre twist of importing and naming of nodes, it is possible to create two nodes with the same name. The modelers in the ATL seem to have an especially well developed skill for creating such nodes.So I built in a mechanism to change the name of nodes that have duplicates, and it works pretty well. Unfortunately, the new routing mechanism is tied into Maya's renaming callbacks. Long story short, if one attempts to export a Maya file that contains multiple nodes with the same name using RawKee, RawKee will be pushed into a never-ending loop. Not something you want your exporter to be doing.Also, at the last minute I added a feature that skips nodes during export if a node is part of a layer whose "displayType" is not "Normal" or whose "visibility" is not on. Unfortunately, I had a typo in the method that evaluates these two layer attributes. The result of which is that any node in a layer does not get exported.However, it took me all day Saturday, but I finally figured out how to fix these issues. On Monday, I will upload a patch to SourceForge. I'm sure there are more bugs, I'll just need to fix them as I go.Unfortunately I don't have time right now to make tutorials for v0.4. It's too bad, because v0.4 is vastly superior to v0.1.4. However, I did remove the tutorials that no longer apply to v0.4, and I placed a 0.4 changes PDF document on the RawKee website:http://rawkee.sourceforge.net/Should anyone be testing v0.4 and have problems, that person can run their questions by the RawKee User's group found at the following URL:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RawKeeUsers/This user's group was established by Shawn Kendall of Immediate Mode Interactive (http://www.imilabs.com/) and co-author of "Practical Java Game Programming". The guys at IMI have been very helpful with RawKee testing and have found several bugs in RawKee. They're also developing a new X3D loader for their Java3D game engine. That's right they'll be using X3D exported by RawKee as an interchange format for their game engine. I'm excited to see where that leads.Now, all the indie game developers really want from RawKee is character skinning. Unfortunately, the ATL is now out of funding for further RawKee development. We've put out some feelers for some funding, but nothing is guaranteed yet. I really wanted to have character skinning, in the form of H-Anim export ready by this year's Siggraph. But it doesn't look like that will be happening at this point. Oh, well. Keep your fingers crossed.Later,Aaron