Yes, the application itself is finished! I’ve spent almost all time I could spare since my last posting (on average several hours a day) for finishing and fixing the last few things/quirks that were left and it’s finished as of now. There were many small things that annoyed me, which needed improvement/fixing and that was what I spent those hours on. It’s somehow frightening to see how those small things consume time fixing them, as there were so many. There were some aspects of the GUI that I disliked and therefore changed (e.g. you couldn’t access the main UI while in character controller or ego-mode), I optimized the shadow calculations to speed it up on complex scenes (though you still need a good system for enabled shadows, depending on the compelxity of the scene), fixed some bugs when loading objects, finally got around fixing some issues with objects that are later on connected into compounds and so on.
And we SDK developers already got a beta of Newton 1.51, which included a fix for the vehicle slowdown with 1.5 I mentioned some news post ago which allowed me to also finish up the vehicle stuff. One addition to the vehicles in NewtonPlayGround is the possibility to offset the center of mass for the chassis. Up until now, the CoM was always at the geometrical center, which was bad especially for high vehicles like a wheeled tank (TpZ Fuchs, if someone is into that military stuff), as such vehicles need a low CoM or otherwise they’ll too easily bend over when turning. So now the user can (after the vehicle is created) offset the center of mass to suite his needs.
Finally I also got around finishing some of the new demonstration scenes I already started (like that house to demonstrate the character controller. It now also has some interior) and made some new ones.