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Welcome To Mantra.NET!

Technical
The Mantra SDK

The simple conclusion I came to, is that in order to be in a position to take advantage of these features when they arrive. Mantra needed to be .NET savvy, with a year of development already spent on development I had some tough decisions to make. I could compile the current code-base using the managed C++ compiler and extend it from there. Or start afresh using C#.

I've opted for the latter, the original code-base was heavily reliant upon the component object model (COM), continuing with this framework would mean a variety of options available to managed code would have to be ignored (or significant sections of the original code-base would need to be changed). I've spent many months researching and learning C# and application design using the language. While by no means an expert, I've become familiar enough with the language (and the .NET framework in general) to begin reconstructing Mantra for the managed world.

Mantra.NET is now almost two weeks in development which, although not a very long time, has had me very pleased with the progress and performance of the new code-base. I'm hoping to have an early pre-alpha, in-development preview available as a download a short time after the next DirectX update is released. I wont be requesting bug reports or feature requests for this release as it will be an alpha preview, but it should be useful in some way and will give people something concrete to look at.

Once this release is out, I will hopefully release new versions as development progresses. Previously, during C++ development I tried to hold off releases until I was happy with it. This typically ended up in me never releasing anything, so I'm going to try and rectify that situation.

For now, I'm uploading screenshots of the current managed revision of Mantra written entirely in C# in the screenshots section. I've also uploaded the current version of the SDK documentation (again, for those interested) which is also extremely early and is likely to change significantly (especially the Mantra.Geometry namespace).

Downloads
Obtain your own copy of Mantra from here!

Gallery
View some images created using Mantra.

Users
Visit some web-pages of people using Mantra.