Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Intensity Engine 0.9.6

I had hoped to release version 1.0 of the Intensity Engine before the end of the summer, but the final remaining task - some nice example maps - hasn't worked out yet. There seem to be two main problems:
  • It's hard to get maps with commercial-friendly licenses (like CC-BY-SA), which is a requirement for inclusion in the Intensity Engine. There are two main issues here: That some mappers don't want to release their work under such a license, and that many or all existing maps use textures and models that have limiting licensing.
  • A typical chicken-and-egg problem: Release a stable 1.0, and people might start mapping with it, but to release a stable 1.0 we need some maps.
So, the 1.0 release of the Intensity Engine is still pending. However, that won't delay the launch of Syntensity, which should be in a month or so - preparations for that are going well (and it doesn't have the two problems mentioned above).

So instead of releasing version 1.0, I have meanwhile partially lifted the feature freeze on the Intensity Engine, and the current version is now 0.9.6. Changes include:
  • New master server, written from scratch using Django and CherryPy. The old minimaster and asset servers are deprecated (asset storage is now a component in the master server)
  • JPEG 2000 support, for significantly smaller downloads (at the cost of decompression delays after downloading)
  • Copy-paste of entities when mapping
  • Component and signal system for the client and server
  • Plugin system for the JavaScript API, and several example plugins (projectiles, etc.)
  • Allow custom animations (up to 128) per model
  • Enable the Cube 2 ragdoll system
  • Config file autogenerator and converter (from Cube 2 configs)
  • Improved textures for water, lava, etc.
  • Various bug fixes

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