I'm happy to announce that the new owners of Ryzom have made significant efforts to embrace GPL. One of the big moves that they made was contacting us in the community and working with us. Additionally they have gone through efforts to set up new repositories and shared tools hosted on the Ryzom network for both internal NeL developers and community members.

To cut to the chase - this means that OpenNeL will be ceasing activity on its fork and will begin merging the fork back into the official GPL NeL hosted on the Ryzom network. While some may view this with mixed feelings I can say personally that the vast majority of the NeL/OpenNeL community is happy, excited and anxious to start it's new adventure with the new owners of Ryzom.

We've been approached with respect and interest and are no longer falsely considered a liability. I think that this positive view of our contributions will go a long way to foster a strong, fruitful relationship and we certainly hope it will go a long ways to bettering NeL and ultimately Ryzom.

Please see the official announcements and new site for more information.

And please, from here forward, update the new site as in a matter of months this site will no longer be accessible.

The popular NeL-based Mtp Target game has been open-sourced under the GPL license. This fantastic game was written by acemtp from OpenNeL community and is inspired by the popular console game Super Monkey Ball. Please check out this wonderful game and don't be afraid to contribute to his cause.

The OpenNeL community is happy to announce that we now have a fully functioning live Snowballs shard.This is shard is a built out of Subversion after the 0.5.0 build. If you would like to play (and we encourage that you do play,) please build a Snowballs client from Subversion and add the following into your client.cfg:

Login                = "login_name";
Password             = "your_password";
LSHost               = "snb-ls.opennel.org:49994";
Local                = 0;
UseDirectClient      = 1;
ClientApplication    = "snowballs";
ShardId = 300;

Some of these configuration variables are already in the config file and you will have to replace them, some will be new. Replace login_name and your_password with your own unique password. If the account does not exist, it will automatically be created for you. We hope that soon we will be able to put this all into nice, fancy menus in the game itself but for the time being, this is how. If you experience any problems, please post in the forum, post a bug or contact us in the IRC channel.

Note: A MySQL reconnection issue has been fixed that was causing the Login Service to fail after the MySQL connection timed out.
Note: Also fixed a bug with the frontend service that was crashing all clients on a server when another client would disconnect before identifying.

The mail server on opennel.org was not able to send mail out for awhile and this has been resolved. Your JIRA watchers should resume emailing you. Sorry for the inconvenience.

NeL has had CEGUI support through a contributed library for awhile now but now that library is part of the main NeL build tree. Providing integration to CEGUI allows NeL developers to quickly get started on their game without the distraction of having to design a GUI toolkit. CEGUI NeLRenderer is in src/cegui and include/nel/cegui and has a fully functioning sample in samples/3d/cegui. This is written for CEGUI 0.5 but can be very easily regressed to work with CEGUI 0.4.1 if necessary. Special thanks to the CEGUI team for providing a fantastic GUI toolkit and for providing a nice, clean interface to implement various renderers.

This is only the baseline for the renderer. We will be cleaning up and converting it into a pure NeL library so that using it and loading it is much cleaner and seamless to NeL users. If you are working with this and are experiencing problems feel free to open an issue up on JIRA, contact us on IRC or use the forums. If you are having problems with CEGUI, the CEGUI datafiles or have general questions about CEGUI please visit their website for more information. The CEGUI developers can also be found on irc.freenode.net in #cegui.

We're happy to announce that Ace has successfully added OS X support to NeL in Subversion trunk. If you would like to experiment with this you will need Fink or MacPorts (we prefer MacPorts) to install some required libraries (OpenAL and libjpeg, both optional.) We will be cleaning up some of this support and are expecting to fully release it in version 0.6.0.

Kaetemi and a few others have worked on adding support for Visual Studio 9 (2008) as well. This should be fully functioning but is not yet an officially supported compiler.

Feel free to inquire on the forums or IRC if you have problems, questions or other comments!

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.

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.

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.

With the uncertainty surrounding Gameforce France and the unreliability of the server they provided us we, the OpenNeL community, went looking for a new server. I'm pleased to say that we now have our own domain, opennel.org, and are being hosted graciously by Boxed Solutions, Norway. Boxed Solutions have provided us with our own virtual machine to do with as we please and have provided us an enormous amount of flexibility to run the project how we need.

This may be like deja vu to some of you out there, especially those ryzom.org volunteers and long time NeL contributors. Gameforge France, formerly Nevrax France SARL, has again filed for bankruptcy. Since the future of Gameforce France is unclear at this point in time and they only have three (3) weeks to find a buyer we, the OpenNeL community, are taking action to ensure that the engine isn't lost. We will post more news here once we have some more news.

To see the official announcement, please visit the Ryzom website.

Due to the stability problems we've been having with the server we've decided to move the source code to our SourceForge project. The documentation on this site has been updated and you can also get the new location from SourceForge. If you previously had commit access please use your SourceForge user. If that user does not provide you permission then let ace or sfb know and they'll get you set up.

Some good news for those of you who are not ardent 3DSMAX supporters. A group that contributes to OpenNeL has a proof-of-concept Maya plugin and exporter that they are beginning to test. It supports exporting most everything OpenNeL requires with the exception of some skeleton and animation related bits of data. They're also writing a patch painter that will harness innovative Maya features to allow the rapid creation of landscape zones. When more news is available or when a release is ready be sure to check here for more information!

Today we got JForum set up and integrated with the rest of our user system. Check out our new forums here! Special thanks goes out to Spex for his fantastic custom coding on JForum to make it authenticate off JIRA. It's still a little "under construction" but it is fully usable now!

Happy coding!

Some of you may have noticed that Nevrax.org is currently down. This has some alarmed but I just want to put you at ease - Gameforge is not disbanding the site. They are having some issues with their external hosting and are feverishly working at moving all of the community hosting internal. In the meantime we do have the Ironic Entertainment backup CVS site online and this backup of the Tikiwiki site. Please feel free to contact me at matt dot raykowski at gmail dot com if you have any problems with this site or the IE dot Com backup CVS.

Please be aware that since the server that performed the synchronization between the IE dot Com backup server and Nevrax/Gameforge is down that our backup CVS does not reflect the most recent (internal) CVS snapshots. I'm hoping that we can get this worked out as well, and I will post news when I get more information from Gameforge. Thank you all for your patience!