The new GIT repository is a sneak preview
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.png)
, but for your convenience here an excerpt from the doc/RELEASES file:
2011_04_17 r19
Radiant Nature release:
Enhanced Sky Model
- Night is darker
- Fog adjustments
Enhanced Models
- Adjusted collider to actual animated model size.
- Added Scorpion mech model
- Added Flopsy mech model
- Added tank models
- Added cockpit frame to basic mech model
- Disabled weapon rendering in favor of model rendering
- Selection of models randomized so far
- Made walkcycle more natural
- Added bird walkcycle
Enhanced Landscape Rendering
- Added crater-modification
- Added Sprite based particle Trees
- Added Tree-clusters frustum culling for speedup and quality
- Adjusted texture grain
- Woodland in this release
Enhanced Immersion
- Adjusted field of view
- Added acceleration heaviness
- Added steering heaviness
- Added smoke after explosion
Enhanced Usability
- Camera mode can still be changed when wrecked
Enhanced Internals
- Object-role interdependencies split into decoupled bound-components
- Glued component-attributes through bindings in objects
- Component'ified Weapons and other functional structures
- Replaced weapon mount matrix with quaternion+position for effective binding
- Cleaned up model scaling
This release has some visual highlights like the trees, smoke and new terrain.
But there are major changes under the hood stepping beyond the object-with-roles concept:
Object-with-components. But there is more to the new internals than just
"hey, objects are built of components" (as if that would be new). No, it is how
components are coupled or rather decoupled. A solution to this dilemma are
chip-like components which only act on their own state without any method-calls
to any other component. Interaction is achieved by binding input and output variables
(ie. instance member variables) of two components at the object level. Like
soldering chips to a printed circuit board. The idea itself isn't new.
This concept of binding components is precedented by hardware-description-language's
Entity+Portmap and by Bean+BeansBinding.