Thursday, June 18, 2009

Intensity Engine 0.9.5 Release


More screenshots can be seen here.

Since 0.9, a month and a half ago, a lot of work has gone into the 0.9.5 release which is out today (rev. 324). This release is still not considered stable, but is a significant step towards that (in fact it may be the last release before 1.0). Two main areas of focus in this release are:
  • Allowing people to run their own infrastructure - master server, asset servers, and server instances - without any connection to Syntensity. This allows both federation (separate independent servers, with loose connections - like the WWW) and makes it easier to customize the Intensity Engine for non-standard uses.
  • Improving content creation and collaboration. This is now in a good enough state to allow focusing on content creation, which is one of the main tasks remaining before the Intensity Engine 1.0 release and public launch of Syntensity.
In more detail, here are some of the changes:
  • 'clientSet' state variables, which are applied first on the client, allowing better responsiveness in an easy way
  • Initial login to server instances made faster
  • AreaTriggers made significantly faster, and now work correctly on server
  • Allow maps to extend the position protocol messages, for faster updates of map-relevant information like custom animation settings
  • Allow rendering models (including players) from map scripts, for more flexibility in visuals
  • Added almost-finished Stromar character model
  • Update of server-side NPC/bot system to current API
  • Various API extensions (e.g., allowing gravity to be changed)
  • Various minor GUI and usability improvements
  • Full support for building on Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04, Windows XP and Windows Vista
  • Plenty of bug fixes
Binary builds aren't planned for this release, as things are still moving quite fast.


Towards 1.0

The Intensity Engine is now in feature freeze. Only bugs in existing features will be fixed for the 1.0 release, which is dependent upon
  • a decent level of stability and polish, and
  • a reasonable amount of working content that can be distributed with the engine or at least used to demo it

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