News
Since a few weeks, Nightfall is maintained in Git instead of Subversion. This was a natural move as I (Alexander) am the only one who has been working on it the last few months, and I've been using git-svn for about half a year. But it is still actively under development, and hopefully there will be a release in a few months. The main parts I am currently spending time on is the network game support and the GUI. At the same time, I am pondering using the POCO C++ Libraries as a solution to threading, networking, zip archives, xml parsing and generation, file system abstraction and hashing algorithms. If you are interested in helping, please drop me a line!
The whole project is now licensed under GPLv3, after the authors have discussed it internally for a while.
The subversion repository is up again... since approximately two weeks ago :)
Our subversion repository is currently down. Please use the git-svn repository instead, in the meantime.
The terrain engine has been rewritten and is now 100% VBO-based (this means that it's faster), and it's also prettier and less buggy.
It can still be improved a lot, though, in particular in how the texturing of the terrain is done.
We do now have a proper bug tracker! Access it from the menu.
After more than a month of development in a separate branch, the new scenegraph-based renderer is finally in trunk. With it it brings a modern rendering architecture with support for (GLSL) shaders, and a potential for optimization of OpenGL state changes (this means that there's a potential for a rather big performance boost for the unit renderer).
The game also uses a modern model file format now. A loader for the OGRE .mesh.xml format has been written, and has replaced the old VRML loader. This has gained us:
- The ability to load in normals from the model file instead of generating them at run time
- An easy way to export models from Blender
- Support for additional vertex attributes, like binormals an tangents
- Potential support for animations in the future
- 3000+ lines of complicated and not totally bug-free VRML loader code, which was replaced by a 400 line OGRE .mesh.xml loader
There's also support for a new file format for specifying modifiers for models. It currently only does transformations. This way, you can resize, rotate and translate models without changing the model files. Some models are currently not correctly transformed; this is in the works and is done through these files.
Another new file format is the selector file format, for choosing between models and shaders based on the currently set settings, to enable different quality levels.
Some parts of the renderer are still waiting to be properly integrated into the new renderer, like the effects and gui renderers. They are put into the scenegraph using wrappers at the moment.
The clear-sighted should also have noted that we now have a wiki.
And as usual, there are a few new screenshots in the screenshots section.
We have a domain, and a webhost! And a few new screenshots...
Well, not really, it's still under construction. But welcome anyway, dear visitor!