[xoreos-devel] 0.0.6 release video

[Vsevolod Kremianskii]

Hi! I sort of got it laid out, except for the KotOR bits. Any feedback
would be appreciated.

ср, 13 мар. 2019 г. в 16:18, Vsevolod Kremianskii <vkremianskii at gmail.com>:

> Okay, then. It makes sense for me to wait until you sort out the
> changelogs :)
>
> ср, 13 мар. 2019 г. в 14:38, Sven Hesse <drmccoy at drmccoy.de>:
>
>> Hej!
>>
>> On 2019-03-13 11:54:35 +0700, Vsevolod Kremianskii wrote:
>> > What are our plans for the next release, @DrMcCoy?
>>
>> Hmm, yeah, I guess it would be time again for another release
>> soon-ish; it's been 8 months.
>>
>> For the name, if we're going to continue with the alphabetical and
>> game release order, 0.0.6 would get a name beginning with "E" from
>> Neverwinter Nights 2.
>>
>> "Elanee" would be my suggestion. :)
>>
>> > I would like to try
>> > recording a release video similiar to what OpenMW team does.
>>
>> That would be very great, yes :D
>>
>> In the past, I did a few straight-up recordings of xoreos running, but
>> I have no idea about video editing or proper presentation.
>>
>> > For starters, I could go over PRs after 0.0.5 and draft a scenario for
>> you
>> > to review.
>>
>> Sure. I also should go over the commit histories to update our
>> ChangeLogs. Maybe I you can then use the ChangeLogs as a base for what
>> to record? I usually use them as a base for the text in the NEWS.md
>> and the release announcements.
>>
>> Oh, and I should see if I forgot to copy over commits from one repo to
>> another, in cases where it applies.
>>
>> Btw, please also mention the xoreos-tools and Phaethon in your release
>> video. I'd still like these sub-projects to become a draw for modders
>> of the original games.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Sven
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> xoreos-devel mailing list
>> xoreos-devel at xoreos.org
>> https://xoreos.org/mailman/listinfo/xoreos-devel
>>
>
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# Scenario of a release commentary for xoreos 0.0.6

## Intro

Hi and welcome to xoreos. This is a first release commentary in a decade long history of the project.

xoreos is a reimplementation of the BioWare Aurora engine and derivatives, which are used to power such games as Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and Dragon Age: Origins. xoreos has a goal to create a highly portable and extensible game engine to run the aforementioned games.

The project was started in 2010 by Sven Hesse, then a computer science student from Germany. With the help of numerous contributors over the years, it have been developed steadily ever since.

In this video we'll showcase the changes in the latest release of xoreos, version 0.0.6, code-named Elanee.

## Release changes

xoreos has historically been using OpenGL with the fixed function pipeline, which has long been deprecated and replaced by shaders. There was a long-standing effort by mirv-sillyfish to bring shader-based rendering to xoreos, which has finally found it's way into master. Shader-based renderer potentially gives us an improved performance and a better control over the rendering process. This feature is still a work-in-progress and should be explicitly enabled with a "rendernew" command line option.

Another quality of life improvement is the ongoing transition of the codebase to the C++11 standard. This enables us to write cleaner code and use the standard library classes in place of their Boost and SDL equivalents, which, in theory, improves portability of the engine.

Supermanu has finished his work on the pathfinding feature, which was merged into master, but is not yet integrated with the game logic. Pathfinding means better AI and smoother gameplay, when it will eventually be used by the game engines.

We also have gained initial support for the ActionScript and ScaleForm Gfx, thanks to Nostritius. This brings us closer to a having a functional user interface in the Dragon Age games.

Neverwinter Nights 2 has finally got some attention recently, thanks to rjshae, who is gradually adding new features to the engine, including cursors, traps, triggers and support for more NWScript functions.

KotOR games have received the most significant update in this release. The engines were unified between the two games, leading to a major code deduplication and an improvement in the ease of development.

<Object interaction>
<Camera collision detection>
<NPC equipment>
<Party management>
<Original AI>
<Unlock action>
<GUI scaling>
<Lightsabers>
<Skip prologue in KotOR2>

There are, of course, other changes, which we will not cover as part of this video. Full changelog is available in the project's repository on GitHub.

## Future plans

xoreos is a very ambitious project, and while there have been a lot of progress over the years, there is still much to be done. Due to a relatively slow pace of development, we do not yet have a release roadmap. It is likely, however, that KotOR games and Neverwinter Nights will be our primary areas of improvement in the future.

You can follow the project on our GitHub page (a link is in the description). Feel free to tinker with the source code, your contributions are very welcome. Also, check out our subprojects: xoreos-tools and Phaethon.

Thanks. Bye!