This version is mainly a bug fix version, mainly focused on bring ZenCub3d to work on Vista, and reducing the number of ways the program can crash, so on first glance you probably won’t find much difference. Actually, even on second glance you probably still won’t find new features, that’s because we are now under going some core-engine rewrite, which will (hopefully) result in a huge range of benefits in the future, namely shorter time of development /maintenance time, and ease of adding in new features, just to name two without going into a huge amount of detail. Actually you can already see some benefits in this current release, we’ve already cleaned up the code base that our installer download is already 5Mb smaller, and the final install is at least 40Mb smaller than the previous beta version. We will do even better in the future.

EDIT: kkffoo at Pineapple Chunks wrote a short blog entry about us, and even have a really funky short animation in that entry. Go see it!

Even though 48Hours’ results have been announced, I got an email yesterday from Steve the Christchurch’s 48 manager, that our team have won the best animation category in Christchurch, and so we are still in contention for the nation-wide animation award. It’s great news, though I don’t know, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is largely due to the fact that our team is the only animation team in Christchurch. Anyway, still feel quite lucky.

On other fronts, the development of ZenCub3d still goes on, even though losing some traction due to the random happens in entrepreneurs’ lives in the last month or so. We have identified the cause of a few mysterious bugs that have eluded us for a while, so the debugging team is dispatched, fully equipped and on their way. The next release mainly focuses on bug fixing, so not much changes in terms of features is expected. Oh yeah, curved waypoints have been in our development branch for a while, so if it reaches a stable enough status you guys might see it in the next release. We’ll certainly post some videos on it when it’s ready.

Lastly, votely on BitFilm is slowly coming to an end. I got an email from them inviting me to attending the award ceremony in Hamburg, and as much as I ‘LOVE’ taking 40+ hour flights to Europe, I had to turn it down since alot of ThinkingCactus internal stuff is happening this half of the year. But nevertheless, have a look at our nominated entry and consider voting for us if you think we deserve it