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

Monday, August 10, 2009

Introducing Gregor

I'm very happy to announce that Gregor Koch has joined the Syntensity team. In the past he has worked at many game companies, including Crytek where he worked on the CryENGINE. You can see some of his recent work running on the Intensity Engine in the video below.

With Gregor in charge of art and design, we should have some very impressive game content for the Syntensity launch.