Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Release


The last couple of days I've been trying to get a release of Ember out. It seems I've finally succeeded. First I had to tackle my box crashing all the time. Turns out that it wasn't the SATA card after all (but not until I already had ordered a new card from the local web retailer). Apparently it was the VMWare network kernel module which didn't want to play nice with my Mandriva kernel, resulting in random kernel panics. After applying a "vmware any-to-any patch" it seems to work a little better, even though I've had the box lock up after applying it.
Moving on, of course a lot of different problems would rear their ugly head once I started testing on Windows. Some of them had to do with lousy memory handling on my part, but some seemed to originate from the Ogre GPU code. I've disabled specular normal mapping with Pixel Shader 1 for now, since it seems there's some problems in how Ogre handled my scripts for that.

After all this however I finally managed to get a working version of Ember out. Version 0.5.0. The main news is that it's using Ogre 1.4.3 and CEGUI 0.5.0. The latter means that the gui now has a lot more capabilities than before. There's also a lot of changes going into this release, such as a new entity editing framework. And a lot of internal restructuring to make for a better foundation.

I'm going on vacation now for two weeks or more, so this is pretty much the worst time to do a release. But I'm so sick of having to wait for it; I just want to get it out there. All bugs that are sure to appear as people start using it (and I know people are, even though only a very few turn up at IRC or the forums) will be handled once I get back.

Oh, and another thing. We've started a trial of Launchpad, which is the Ubuntu project management tool. I've put up some initial blueprints and bug reports there. I think the tool has a lot of potential, but it remains to be seen if we're really gonna use it. The entry for Ember can be found here. All bug reports regarding Ember should be posted there from now on.

5 comments:

rogerdv said...

Is there any plan to change movement system? I really cant get use to mouse look in a chase view.

Erik Hjortsberg said...

Well, I have looked at how other popular clients work, such as Second Life and WoW. With the new ability to move by using the "move to" menu option, it might perhaps be good to have an option where the camera could be moved around the avatar without causing movement updates. It's certainly something that I'll look into.
I'm trying to use the Launchpad more and more. I'll add this as a future blueprint.

rogerdv said...

That will be nice. I have tested the client locally and have found very annoying to constantly click to change, and anyway most of the time I dont know if I can move or what.

Erik Hjortsberg said...

Did you have any problem with the "move to here" menu option (i.e. when you click on the terrain and get the "move to" option)?

rogerdv said...

No, that works perfect. But I think it is not the best choice in case you are fighting with several mobs/players. In such situation I would like to be able to move using keys and have mouse available for targeting.