It's my pleasure to announce that the OpenNeL community has put together their first release: 0.5.0

A lot of effort has been put into this release, here is a brief list of changes that have been made in this release:

• Cleaned up the build environments (autotools, MSVC8 and KDevelop)
• Ported to amd64 processors.
• Fixed a major crash with Vertex Buffers that only affected landscape on nv50 cards (Special thanks to Spex for his work on this)
• Resurrected the OpenAL driver. This sound driver now works for all spacial sound except background music.
• The GTK Displayer (for network services on Linux) now compiles. This is a custom compilation flag.
• As a precursor to more runtime performance tweaks we fixed a few system info methods.
• Updated OpenGL support to the latest glext headers.
• Removed extraneous MFC includes for VC8 Express users.
• Fixed the login service, the default SQL schema, CLoginServer and CLoginClient and Snowballs so that online mode is now fully functional.
• A vast amount of cleanup to eliminate errors (thanks again to Spex)
• and finally... We now have Debian packages!! A big thanks goes out to Gürkan Sengün for putting this together and being patient with us.

There was a lot more activity on the project than just this list but these are the major things of note. If you need to check out this release it is under the tag NEL_0_5_0.

 Coming up in 0.6.0 we expect to eliminate the STLport requirement, add more unit tests, add background music support (and ogg loading) to OpenAL, fix pbuffer-based effects (shadows, clouds) in Linux, add a CEGUI renderer and release a public Snowballs server (which may even happen before the release.) In the works also is a large-scale cleanup of the Snowballs media database which involves converting the MAX files to a newer format and building NSIS installers of all of the necessary tools for artists. We're also hoping, time depending, on releasing support for OS X and IA64 processors.

One last time, special thanks to: acemtp, Spex, tarzeau, Kervala, and Kaetemi.

I'm happy to announce that in the on-going development towards OpenNeL 0.6.0 we have successfully eliminated the STLport requirement. If you are working with SVN trunk on Windows please be sure to remove the STLport include directories from your VC Project Directories. There is still some work to be done around some STLport-specific optimizations within the particle system allocation and point light allocation but otherwise all important tools and samples have been tested successfully excluding any pre-existing problems.

Please report on JIRA immediately any problems you encounter with SVN trunk as they may be related and we want to aggressively attack all bugs so that we can increase the quality of the next release!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the effort to eliminate STLport from our requirements list.

In the past week or so I noticed that authentication to the forum had been a little slow but I had been able to log in. A new user contacted via email to inform me that they could log into the other applications (Confluence and JIRA) but not JForum. Through some investigation I found that the JForum-JIRA connector was still doing a portion of the authentication and authorization against the old OpenNeL server (open.nevrax.org) and these servers are no longer online. This is why it was awful slow. JForum cached people who had logged in since the last Tomcat reboot but as soon as I restarted Tomcat I was no longer able to log in as well. This has all been resolved and all users should be able to authenticate with JForum and it should no longer be slow! Thank you for your patience.