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The project slowed down in May as all our lead developers and most major contributors were faced with end-of-semester exams. We also have to honestly admit that some difficult, hairy bugs have brought coding progress to a crawl. Crawling is something warriors have to do from time to time.
- Congrats to Archwyrm on getting his Bachelor's degree in Computational Linguistics!
- Phlogios has some new blades in the gallery. And now he's turning to some more everyday fixtures and furniture.
- echo has returned and is working out an installer script to build DungeonHack on the popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. It should also work on all Debian-based distros once completed, which it's not yet.
- This will make DH more accessible to the Linux community in general, which includes a high percentage of programmers and other potential contributors.
- newcomer Valtur Naa has been churning up the gameplay idea threads. It may be a little much to read through.
- Broodsugar and his crew have been busy adapting for DungeonHack part of the "Harran Realms" world he's been writing and developing for some years. This is the strongest candidate yet for a lore to replace the Bethesda-owned material in Daggerfall which originally inspired our community.
- Added the GeSHi syntax highlighter extension to the wiki. This provides formatting to source code examples to make them easier to read, just as most IDEs and programmer-oriented text editors do.
- Lead Programmer Archwyrm has been wrestling with some performance damaging bugs with loading foliage in the terrain. Part of his solution is implementing the Paged Geometry library for OGRE and he's optimistic about having it working soon-- watch the forums.
- While we are behind schedule on making our next release, we are actually ahead of schedule in replacing a few libraries. First off, we have replaced FMOD with ALURE/OpenAL for sound. Work is ongoing with these libraries, but our implementation is mostly complete. We would very much like to thank Chris (author of ALURE and OpenAL Soft) for assisting us in reworking our sound system.
- Now that we have substituted both Netwon and FMOD, DungeonHack uses only free software / open source software libraries. These changes have come about for both philosophical and technical reasons and we believe that DH will become a better game because of that.
- Our scripting system now uses Python 2.6, which is known for being easy to learn and quick to develop with. Our intent is to make much of DH script driven for ease of development and customizability while doing all the "heavy lifting" in our C++ code. Initial threading work has been completed in order to support Python, which has laid the groundwork for more extensize thread usage throughout the whole game.
- All of these library changes have been made possible through the hard work of our very busy developer, Garvek. If you happen to see him on the street, buy him a beer. ;)
- The 0.10 demo announced a while back was delayed. Software is a complex thing, and delays common. But more than anything, I had faith that our coders could work it out. So it's with pride I announce they've solved the problems that cropped up while switching from the physics system DungeonHack was originally hardcoded to use! DH with Bullet now builds on Win32 as well as Linux (which always built fine)!
- Our lead modeler Phlogios predicted that once the project was gaining steam, we'd see a steady stream of 3D artists to create the ambitiously large amount of optimized art assets our strategy calls for. He's been right! We don't have enough yet, but aside from the "Lund Longship" crew he's recruited locally, we've seen a steady upward trend in new modelers coming aboard DH.
- We have a particular need for animators. If you understand rigging, weight painting, and other such things, you will score so many scones here! We will love you.
- The chilling effect from Bethesda's legal refusal to endorse a remake has had our creative vision for the game (beyond being Daggerfallian at heart) in tumult for a long time. This has left artists unable to know what exactly to create. The strongest lore contributor to date is working on an impressively well considered setting and, despite some creative differences, has been flexible and committed. We may be very close to decisions that set the framework within which the broader group of lorists on the team can contribute their own aspects of the whole picture.
- Developers' chat this Sunday, Mar. 30, at 19:00 (7pm) GMT, @ irc.FreeNode.net #DHackers.
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