[1] ANOTHER Modeller? Why?

Yes, there seems to be a about a dozen half-working / half-started 3d modeller projects that are intended to work under Linux. I actually didn't want to start another one. But I felt that none of the existing projects offered a flexible enough framework for me to add the features I needed for my animation projects. In fact very few of the hoardes of modellers have *any* animation features, so in that regard Extreme Wave might stand out a little.

[2] What are you developing it with?

Extreme Wave is being written in C++. I am trying not to use any terribly exotic features (for portability and readability). Extreme Wave only utilizes one custom template which should work with compilers that generally have poor template support. I have had a lot of trouble with different STL implementations on different compilers so there are no longer any STL requirements.

I am developing the modeller with Mesa 3.0 (although older versions are known to work), and the latest snapshot of fltk (which will probably be making a 1.0 release soon.)

Guile is Extreme Wave's primary extensibility language. I chose Guile because it is lean and powerful. In the future, I hope other bindings will become available.

[4] You should use <insert your favorite toolkit here>!

Fltk is a free (LGPL) c++ gui toolkit that was designed to work well with OpenGL/Mesa. It is incredibly fast, stable and portable. In short, I REALLY like it. I have played with the OpenGL capabilities (usually an awkward add on) of other toolkits and none compare.

[5] What's the licensing?

Oh yeah -- This modeller is libre under the GPL.

[6] Can I help?

YES. Feel free to make modifications! Extreme Wave is no sacred cathedral, bang on it until it does what you want it to do. I plan to pursue an agressive bazaar style development strategy with frequent tarball releases and most work being done in CVS. Email me with your patches. If you send me a lot of good patches or convince me that you know what you are doing I'll probably offer you a CVS account. You can keep up with development discussions on the Extreme Wave mailing list.

[7] What's with the duck?

Marc has this theory on video game systems, that in order to do well they need a cute marketable mascot. For example Mario & Nintendo, Sonic & Sega, etc. Likewise, many successful free software projects have cute creature characters: Tux the Penguin, Wilbur the Gimp, Mozilla's Zilla, etc.

Not to be out done, I created Wade the Duck. It's actually the first model I ever made in Extreme Wave, constructed from a whopping 17 spheres.