The more observant among you many have noticed a larger than normal activity-spike on our Github repositories recently, and wondered what was up. Well today wonder no more.
Its frankly a relief to get back into a more regular release pattern, and this one in particular should hopefully not disappoint. Away3D 4.1 Alpha is one of those things beloved of open source developers everywhere – a feature update. 
Full details of all features in this release can be found over in our blog at Away3D.com, but the highlights include GPU accelerated particles, multipass materials, ATF texture support, realtime reflections, tools and geometry refactors, view volume partitioning, stereoscopic renderers… the list goes on.
However, all good fun must come to an end, and as this is an Alpha version, we are turning to you the community for help on the next stage of 4.1 development – fixing stuff. Any issues with the API, runtime errrors, performance problems etc, we want to hear about it. Use the ultra simple issues tracker in Github to get your message across, and while you’re there, perhaps even have a go at fixing a few!
My main contribution in this release has been around the new particles feature, and I have to make sure I give a shout out to the person who made most of that possible – the utterly awesome Liao Cheng. For now the team will be powering towards a stable beta, which we will hopefully be revealing more on in the coming weeks.