Ardor3D Overview

Ardor3D is a professionally oriented, open source, Java based 3D engine for desktop (GNU Linux, Mac OS X, OpenIndiana, Windows) and mobile (Android) environments. The sub-project ardor3d-android was based on Android OpenGL ES.

Ardor3D was created September 23rd, 2008 as a fork of JMonkeyEngine by Joshua Slack (Renanse) and Rikard Herlitz (MrCoder). It was developed by Ardor Labs and some contributors until its version 0.9. Renanse abandoned the project March 11th, 2014 and he started to work on it anew in February 2017.

JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation is the fork actively developed and maintained by JogAmp's community and supporting exclusively JOGL 2 (and later). It was initially designated as a subset of the original engine as it has retained the only renderer relevant for JogAmp's community. As a consequence, it supports only desktop environments, the Android backend might be rewritten with JogAmp in another version. This fork is preferably called JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation in order to avoid any confusion with the "official" legacy version. As time goes by, the "official" Ardor3D and JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation have been diverging, the former has a more modern rendering pipeline based on shaders and it no longer supports JOGL whereas the latter has numerous importers (PLY, STL, MD3, ...), a frequently updated API documentation, no dependency on Guava, a lot less static utilities that can't be customized, a partial support of OpenGL ES in both desktop and embedded environments.