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.