I'm always using the JAR-utility that comes with the JDK. I once tried to include a project's classes and all associated libs into a jar using JBuilder and i failed (not saying that it isn't possible though), so i reverted to the JDK's JAR-utility.

0.86 is out and it comes with three align()-methods. Two in Object3D and one in Camera. Keep in mind that alignment always happens with the z-axis of either the camera or the object (depending on the method), i.e. if you want to make the camera facing into the direction of another axis than z, the rotation (from z to ...) has to be applied to the camera afterwards:

camera.align(obj); // the camera is now aligned with the positive z-axis of obj (transformed into worldspace)
camera.rotateY((float) Math.PI/2f); // Now it's aligned with the positive x-axis of obj
...


Something similar is required to align an object with another camera-axis than z. Here's an example of just one possibility:


// tmpCam is a temporary camera initialized somewhere and reused here
tmpCam.setBack(camera.getBack().cloneMatrix()); // clone it, to ensure that the rotation does not modify the normal camera
tmpCam.rotateY((float) Math.PI/2f);
obj.align(tmpCam); //The object's positive z-axis is now aligned to camera's negative x-axis


This may look more complicated then it actually is. In your case, you don't have to deal with these cases anyway, i assume. I just wanted to mention them here to show that it's possible even if the standard align()-behaviour is a kind of z-axis-matching. I hope that these new methods are helping you out. If not or if any other questions arrise, please let me know.

No, we are both confused now  :wink:  What you are describing is what i understood too. Maybe my wording wasn't that good...
Anyway, i'll think about it..next week or so...

my program scales all objects in universe about 30 times a second

It's so amazing, which options people are actually using and which options i thought they might use. I remember that, when i added the scaling-method, i thought that no one will ever use this... :wink:

Yeah, right: I decided to release 0.85 today even if not all the features i wanted to add made it into this release. I just wanted to release something that works with the new LWJGL 0.5. In addition, a new scaling method and a simulated flat-shading were added as well as some minor changes to the documentation.
Please note: This version requires LWJGL 0.5 if OpenGL should be used. It won't work with 0.4.

Edit: An updated version of 0.85 has been uploaded that removes the debugging output mentioned in the "bugs"-forum.

I think i like the setTransparentColor()-idea the most. I think i'll add it. I don't know when the next release will be ready though. My new machine and my dev. environment are fine now, but i thougt it might be a good idea to put some Cyanacrylat glue (no...don't ask how this happened) into my left eye...this makes it quite difficult to see things clear...:cry:
Anyway, normals are used for lighting and backface culling and similar stuff. Every vertex of a Object3D is associated with a normal vector, which is rotated and translated together with the object. When scaling is used, the normals are scaled too...but they shouldn't because they have to be normalized (length==1)...hence the name. So they have to be adjusted afterwards. In 0.84 (and all former versions) this rescaling is buggy. The result is, that the object appears too bright or dark, depending on scaling. 0.85 will fix this.

The next release (0.85) will most likely contain the feature you requested. As mentioned, flat shading will be emulated by feeding face normals into the gouraud shader instead of vertex normals, so it won't be any faster than gouraud.
In addition, it disables the usage of triangle strips, so it's even slower when using OpenGL support (not noticeable on nVidia hardware, quite noticeable on ATI cards).