Ahoy,
I just checked in the first development code of the all-new
fancy Freebooters in 3D. This is a major leap forward that
wouldn't be possible without all the fine modeling made by
Esteban Fernandez aka Kabutor.
The first checkin implements a seaplane in which you can
sail around with the cutter ship model. It's pretty hard
to build right now, I advise you to wait a few more days
until I fix things up (won't happen before Wednesday at
the earliest).
The sail physics have been ported from the 2D physics,
and will require more fine tuning as the coords in a 3D
environment are way more finegrained and the steering
feels kinda bumpy right now.
All 3D work is done using the great Ogre engine, which is
Free software (LGPL). Get ogre from www.ogre3d.org. I'm
planning to create Ogre packages for the Debian distribution,
but this will take some time and won't happen before the
0.15 release of Ogre.
All Freebooters development will stay as free as it has been
from the beginning, all models are GPLed with included Blender
sources.
Freebooters won't use 3D extensions only found in proprietary
drivers from Nvidia and ATI. It's perfectly playable with
the free DRI drivers and is intended to be fully enjoyable
on systems with graphic cards of the Voodoo 3, MGA 200 or
ATI Radeon grade. Older models should still be usable in a
reduced resolution such as 640x480.
If you test out the code _please_ send reports about the performance
on various graphic adaptors, as I'm very interested to receive
feedback about the quality of the DRI implementations out there.
Ogre displays an average FPS rate when quitting.
The current release plans:
0.2.2: (in about a week)
- Experimental 3D code will be included, but won't be built by
default
- ReactOS/Windows support by Christoph Dwertmann
- Improved menus (will be pre-allocated for faster responses)
- Improved build system
- Bugfixes
0.3:
- The seatravels between the island will be in full 3D. Fancy
particle effects like rain etc. will hopefully be ready as
well. Seabattles will still use the old 2D system.
0.4:
- Seabattles will be implemented in the 3D engine as well.
If you want to help out, your help is very welcome. Check the TODO
or the website for possible tasks or ask on the mailing list.
Happy hacking,
Moritz
