Time for a new release. This release is meant as a stabilizing release for the scene2d refactoring. All the issues have been resolved and folks helped testing it quite a bit. Thanks to Nate for undertaking this enormous unfuckering. Here are the highlights in terms of new features, bug fixes and API changes:

• Scene2d was refactored by Nate 4 months ago. If you used the nightlies after the 0.9.6 release, you already used the new Scene2d. As a refresher, here are the first and second blog entry on the changes. Also make sure to checkout the UITest code to see how to use tablelayout, scene2d and UI skins. There’s also a few nice wiki pages explaining the API
• We have a functional Livewallpaper support!
• Improved libgdx project setup 3.0
• We deprecated the Jogl backend. If you need to integrate multiple Libgdx canvases into a Swing or AWT application, you can do so, see SwingLwjglTest

We also keep on fixing tons of issues on the issue tracker. We fixed over 1000 issues over the whole life-time of libgdx so far.

Our change to Github was also very beneficial, we pulled in almost 100 pull requests so far, and gained a lot of new contributors.

We started building Maven artifacts, putting them in our private repo and are in the process of creating an archetype. The latter is waiting on the m2e-android maintainer to pull in a request. We are having issues with sharing assets across projects in Eclipse when setup via Maven. Eclipse can’t cope with relative paths, so we need to perform some magic there. Ultimately we will publish our artifacts to Maven Central, along with a nice archetype that works in Eclipse, Netbeans, Intellij Idea as well as the command line.

We are also in the process of adding a cross-platform networking module. It is included in this release, but is likely to change (remind me to work on branches next time…). It will provide you ways to send HTTP requests and do simple socket programming in a cross-platform manner.

The final thing i want to mention is our ongoing progress on the iOS backend. We got things working very well now, but are still thinking about how to make using the backend as easy as possible for the end user. At the moment it’s a bit involved setting up the environment on a Mac. I plan on pushing the first integrated approach at the end of November for you to test. See the blog entries on our iOS progress and the WIP wiki page that documents issues we encountered so far.

Our roadmap for 0.9.8 includes the following features:

• Integrate iOS backend in release
• Finish the 3D API, using the Gameplay SDK encoder to cope with file formats or writting our own wrapper around the FBX SDK (more likely :/)
• Finish the Net module
• Full set of Maven artifacts and a functioning archetype
• Modularize extensions, put them into their own repository so they can be released independently

Thanks to our awesome contributors, libgdx is shaping up to be one hell of an awesome library. Special thanks to Gemserk and Noblemaster for helping a ton with the iOS backend and the new Net module, and Semtiko who’s sending us pull requests left and right