Weekly update: Jan. 13th
In this article, I'll be going over what we've been up to lately. Read on for what's new.
As you might have noticed last week, with the fixing of bloom being part of our eleventh alpha release, we've been getting to work on doing some cool things to our renderer code. This week, we now have proper rimlighting, implemented by gimhael. If all goes well, we'll probably have HDR rendering fixed by the end of the month, too! All model shots in this post have rimlighting and bloom enabled on them, and you can see it for yourself if you're compiling the game from source. One neat thing about rimlighting is that it will affect all models, not just our new ones, so even the remaining Tremulous models should look better until they're replaced.
Besides the renderer, we've been up to other things on the coding front as well. Besides his new work on the bots, Fuma has also been implementing libRocket, which, as you may recall, is one of our beta goals for this quarter. It's part of our codebase now, but there's still a lot left to do with getting it to a usable point. Darren Salt has been going through some bugs, and has now fixed that annoying ‘bad corpseNum’ error that often disconnects players after the end of a game. In addition, he has been doing some interesting things with our bots, putting together a sort of dretch rush game mode that you can try out on his training server. Over time, as we implement a game mode abstraction layer, it will very likely become one of the default modes that a server operator can choose to utilize.
The egg by Dandoombuggy and the overmind by Osiris are both in-game now, but the two models will need some further preparation before we can release them. If all goes well, they should be in the February release, or if not, then March. The overmind has already been animated by gavlig, but we'll need to redo some of the texture maps on it in a higher resolution. As for the egg, it's on standby until velociostrich finishes a texture tool he's been working on. The tool will allow us to make a few minor adjustments to the model before it's ready to be animated. Lastly, chris has been getting to work on a new reactor. You may have already seen his work on the turret and grenade models. I am confident that the reactor will come out quite fantastic.
Our mappers have been up to various things as well. EmperorJack has been doing some more work on Plat23, adding some further detail to the new outside area that made its debut last release. Afterwards, he will likely be returning to his Thunder map, or may begin work on a new map entirely. Pevel is more or less done with Yocto, and sooner or later he'll be getting to work on his second and third maps, which will be Perseus and Antares, respectively. You may recall these maps from Tremulous, these were earlier works by him. He'll be making adjustments to both, as well as giving them a complete graphics overhaul. Viech has been programming a texture tool that will allow him to swap out all the textures on Parpax, replacing the current set with a new, normal mapped one. The tool, which he has named Chameleon, should work on most maps made with some variant of Radiant. Considering the usefulness of such a utility, it will likely see a standalone release for mappers in our community and beyond to use.