Nova Design, Inc. is selling Aladdin 4D into Open Source! We’re talking source code, trademarks, documentation, tutorials and everything! Nova Design has put the entire rights and source code to one of their top software titles, Aladdin 4D, on an exclusive offer to the Open Aladdin 4D group (www.openaladdin4d.com) who are raising the money for it.
Aladdin 4D is a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you’d expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop.
Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine even. Aladdin 4D has already had it’s rendering engine test-compiled under Linux, Mac and other platforms in the past. The source code is fairly standard C source code – no ‘assembly’ required.
The initial money raised through donations will be collected by the Open Aladdin 4D group, headed up by Nate Downes, and will be used to purchase Aladdin 4D from Nova Design. Nova has set the amount at only $37,579.83 which, as they’ve stated, is going to be used by them to pay off old bills. Compared to amounts raised for other Open Source projects, this is minor. Also, any money raised beyond this goal will be used for site costs, and rewards and bounty programs to encourage porting and further development of Aladdin 4D. We have plans for Aladdin’s future, never fear!
Nova Design’s own Kermit Woodall is participating as an advisor and has also agreed to turn over all of the source code for unreleased/uncompleted new features and modules for Aladdin 4D. Additionally all concepts and designs for other features will be freely given over as well.
This project can succeed. Aladdin 4D can be saved from becoming abandonware and grow beyond the old 68k Amiga platform.
Please visit the Open Aladdin 4D site at www.openaladdin4d.com and donate today. The sooner we hit the goal, the sooner we’ll have Aladdin 4D on multiple platforms and being upgraded again!”
Link: openaladdin4d.com
