Hey, it’s time to spam the blog again! People ask when 3.0.3 will be out, so I thought I’d write a bit on subject as well as what’s going on in general.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out? Well, you might know that Thomas is currently on vacation and will not work on release for next two weeks, at least. Then, you also might know about some breaking changes he introduced for better performance, but currently performance seems to be even worse, and so this situation needs some investigation. People who want latest version compatible with 3.0.2 can use revision 663, but be aware that some bugs were fixed after that (not to mention pending bugs).

Still, things aren’t bad for 3.0.3, in my opinion. I make noise and contribute some new stuff (you might have noticed StarField or MD2, I guess). Other people in team keep quiet, but SVN commits notifications give them away If you suddenly notice some clever code or documentation improvements, you know they did it.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out, again? I think you can expect it in August as final version for v9 (unless someone suddenly finds lots of bugs a day after release).

To conclude this post, I’d like to take my chance and congratulate folks at Ginga who released online jets comparison application for Embraer company last week. A part of this great application – flight range flash widget – was designed using two open source libraries, APE and – you guessed it – Sandy.

Using globes for spatial data visualization is something we now see more and more; to address this trend, I just added new tutorial for Sandy users who would like to do something similar themselves. For other people, I plan to release some basic globe component for free, so keep an eye on this secret link.

Max Pellizzaro  continue his great set of tutorials, and he is now introducing WOW, 3D physic engine, and its integration with Sandy3D.

Check them out :

• First WOW tutorial: Bounding Area and Sphere
• Learning how to use WOW Planes

Among the 3.0.2 new features, the new lightening system may be confusing for beginners. For that reason, we have created 2 new tutorials (mind the 30 others) to explain that advanced feature :

• The global lightening system in the new Sandy 3.0.2  : Explains the new shading properties
• Phong attribute explanation with examples. Understand the new phong related properties and how to use them in order to fix some of the common issues.

Sandy Team.