OpenArena Message Boards

Since 0.9.0 is still miles off (100% texture replacement may not be this year), I am planning a new patch version this month, and hopefully I want to make it as small as possible. It's more of a maintenance release than anything else. v0.8.1 is just about one year old!

The gist of it:
- New engine binaries and new VMs with the fixes and such since 0.8.1
- Probably extra maps that don't add a lot of textures.
- The new icon / logo
- New major, sorceress, neko, angelyss, etc won't be in this version
- Drastic new sound changes...won't be in this version.
- Win32 installer may or may not return, maybe NSIS will be used this time around.

Any other things needed to be included?

- What about the new UI for the menu?
- Any sound changes should go IMHO.
- The latest version of OAX too.
- Is there a release date for it? I have small time on these days, (this week and the next) but I can work with Udi for the new 2D, and I can work too on the shaders.

Will you post this on ModDB? :P

Maybe i'll have that. The media files for that is quite small so it's not an impossibility.

"Go" as in go away or go be a part of the patch?

"Go" as being part of the patch, of course.
This sound (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3240.msg26595#msg26595) will be included as well? :D

NO! THATS AN INFERIOR REPLACEMENT!!!




yes replacing obviously crappy sounds is vital

Hmm, why not putting in everything you can provided it's coherent ?
Since you change binaries, I'm not sure of why you shouldn't include every assets/maps you can. (to spare a few of these new things for the 0.9.0 release ? ;) I think meanwhile there will have enough time to get other things which would still make 0.9.0 a huge step forward)
A new version would indeed be welcome, I'd vote for the maximum, even if rather looks like a 0.8.8 rather than a 0.8.5, maybe you can get OA more polished even before 0.9.0.
Just my opinion ;)

It'll weigh too much, nearly 78 or 85 MB in just one PK3. Imagine if you must download that from a server having 0.8.1.

If someone's going to automatically download the patch off a server with v0.8.1 the VM's UI should suggest the full v0.8.5 patch for the engine fixes.

Then, there should be some way to make the VMs to detect the right binaries to have...

It doesn't really matter. There has not been any new functionality added to the binaries, so the old ones will work just fine. Sure the number of CVARs supported has been significantly increased but it is mostly relevant for mods.

There can be added support for engine detection... but I don't think it is worth it for the time being.

Fonts and UI please as this is something that would give a wonderful first impression.

I'm not sure what limiting the download will make. once your hitting 85mb your in broadband territory. If its time/quality concerns I could understand.

New maps and new upgrades of them are surely one of the most welcome

I think any update is better than no update. At least something to keep me busy until the next update.

Personally, size of the update is not that important. Not that I have a lot of bandwidth to waste, but it's something I'll download once, and not on a weekly or daily basis, so it does not make that much of a impact over longer period of time.

As to what to put in the update, I don't know, whatever seems most sensible and can be done in time.

As for the installer, it's not that important. It's pretty easy to extract the archive and make a shortcut, at least for Windows. If you cannot do that then you might want to learn something about using computers.

I'm agree with dbx, size is not a big problem as far it's not a Go update.
And I alway prefer DL an archive than an installer. With an archive you can handle easyly more than one version.
I Think you should put the maximum of thing in this update.

Any release date of this patch? We're near the end of the month, I'm doing a bit of work in some of my maps.

This month?

Oook…just seen the topic…

Will have to setup a building environment (last year's one do not exists anymore), will start shortly. Call me when the sources are ready, I can do the Mac version as usual.

31 at the latest.

31th October? Holy shhh... I hope you don't want to scare the kids with an ugly release this Halloween :). But alright, I go back to work now. *Igor! Pull the switch!*

31/10/2008 was the release date of 0.8.1.
I hope to get something finished before that date.

Question for fromhell:
Which maps will be in 0.8.5, aside of the 0.8.1 ones?

The ones that don't use many new textures.

oa_minia (newer version)
oa_koth2
the two reptctfs
am_underworks
the improved Hydronex
blitzkrieg3

I've finished setting up my new building enviroment, it is all working now, however I still have a problem, tried to solve it but no luck so far.

I'm now building the game on a G4 with Leopard, I used to build it on the same G4, but with tiger. The problem is that the resulting binary can't run on G3s, I get


at run time.

It may seem pointless to build OA for a platform that reached end of production over 5 years ago, but it still runs very well on recent G3s and I don't plan to abandon them soon. Any suggestion?
In the worst case I'll setup a building environment on a Tiger system somewhere.

Could it be related to this ? -> http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3-commits/2009-October/001608.html

I don't think so: i'm still using oa 0.8.1 sources, wich ran just fine on a G3 last time I built them on Tiger.

Maybe there was a change in the Leopard SDK ... it seems me to understand that Leopard has dropped G3 support :/

yes, it did, and this is , i think, the main problem: most of the system libraries are built only for g4 and higher. I however tried to build everything using the mac os x 10.4 sdk, a usual, but nothing changed. The best result obtained so far was accomplished using the ogg and vorbis libraries i built years ago, without recompiling them: on the g3 the game start, i see the intro movie, then shuts down with "error 4".

I've finished installing tiger on an external disk with my old iBook (which is mi mom's now…), installing xcode, will try there…I should be able to borrow it for this release, it will be surely better than compiling on the G3 itself…

I'll have a new reptctf11 ready for today.

I don't know if this is a good time to mention it but I'll be unavailable from 30 Oct to 1 Nov both inclusive.

Built on Tiger, works fine on the G3 as well. :)

Tested on G3 Tiger, G4 Tiger and Leopard and X86_64 Snow Leopard (game startup, ogg reproduction, a couple of minutes of local network playing), will post a download link soon, so you can test it if you want. It should run on any system with Tiger or higher, possibly also on 10.3.9, as usual.

Here is it (http://www.jazzmobile.it/jackoverfull/games/openarena/OpenArena2009.zip).

Just call me when the sources are ready…

Ha! Wow, looks like i'll still be playing on my 600g3!

That's the idea… ;)

OA still runs fine with medium details on my G3 600, I don't see a reason to abandon it now.

Because it doesn't make money for Apple, that's why they want you to.  Gotta love defective by design. :P Similarly, I don't want to abandon Windows 95 support either.

Well, I can see why they want to get rid of it: for them is just more work and more money to spend. They adopted an informal ten year lifetime cycle, which isn't all that bad…
Anyway, Tiger is still supported and will be updated at least to the end of 2010.

Right.

Guess who had a Karmic Koala failure!

Deadline pushed to Nov 2.

Koalas have a cute image, but they can be vicious and bite people :(

There could be a patch RC any day now. The Karmic situation only affected me by a day and a half. Web site development is unaffected.

Loved Karmic more than Jaunty, although having used the Beta's it seems like they had lots of trouble with the transition. I hope they sort out the nomodesetting stuff for kms and I was surprised at intel with the whole GMA500 thing.

Was all alone tonight with my Girl out having Girly fun so Openarena would have been fantastic. Guess I will have to wait for Monday. I wonder which day is best to launch on for a project of this type! I would have possibly said Friday!?

Question:
Will be ps9ctf (which is on the SVN) on this patch as well? It's a very nice map and AFAIK it uses only OA textures.

Looking forward to this update! This will keep everyone happy until 0.9.0 for sure. :)

Yes.


Nov 2 has hit, content freeze now. The new 2D improvement package will be in there too.

The suspense is killing me!

What about the sources?

2. Nov was commit freeze? Darn. I was busy and fixing things. Where did you put that lei? *grrr*

What the hell? This is not funny. I have several things that just need another compile and are done.

still waiting, if the sources are ready i'll be more than glad to build them and send the os x binaries back…

You should have read the topic. :P

well, I'm missing something or we are now at november 4th…?

The deadline for 0.8.0 was August 1st. and that version came at August 8... We can expect that 0.8.5 can be among us before the weekend... or maybe not, only fromhell knows. :/

For the next time maybe it will better at least ONE MONTH before the freeze to advice the devs/contributors/interested members by PM and/or by mail or to create a dedicated section/ a group in the forum for imminent deadlines of OA bug fixes/updates/releases.

A too hasty cat brings into the world blind puppies ( approx translation of another nice way of saying )

Kind of communication issue. Just a single topic does not catch my eye especially if there is a 0.82 and a 0.85 thread. If lei is wanting a quick launch of 0.85 (where is 0.82 release?) why not contact the sole contributers directly? There was no arguing for a new release for a very long time and now everything should be ready within a few days? Reading forums is painful if you have a limited amount of sparetime.
I will have new/improved versions of ctf_inyard, ctf_compromise, slimefac, oa_koth2 and two new skins ready over the weekend. One teleportermodel is done (a 2nd skin for it is not ready) and the second teleporter model is modeled but untextured. I planned to use it in new slimefac but will drop the idea because of time pressure. :(

Did anybody of you discuss about a quality check of new content? Is there a testing period of the new release or will it be the usual way?
Is the new singleplayer campaign Neon_Knight, chaoticsoldier and I worked on included?

I perfectly agree.


Essentially, did anyone beside fromhell knew that a 0.8.5 release was planned for about now before this topic?

The old SMF theme and the original has a news section in the top. The current one hasn't, but it could be used for displaying such news. I'm working on an SMF theme, it will have the news section. SMF can handle groups, and newsletters for groups, so a contributor group could come handy, maybe even a restricted category for them.

Also, we had 1 entire YEAR to do everything OA related.

why are you taking out models, add more. put more guns too. and add some other cool stuff. new menu plz :D and yes logo, and intro make a new one :P oh..

we should a make a OA movie. with everyone one in oa. it will be a like a comedy-drama  thing! :P

So..uh..where's the new release? I've been advertising it in servers :p

I'm sorry that announcing a "quick patch" was an available idea. Should I revoke it?  The deadline was set so I don't suddenly stop and re-test the new changes thoroughly with new content coming in. New maps to the patch wasn't even on my mind originally. I'm striving for a comfortable small size here, the big 100mb+ commit to the SVN just for new maps and textures some months back isn't going to be the same in this patch.

 Time is lacking for me, I can barely check my mail and auth new registrations here.
 Another time eater was the Windows shell. Do you like hard 20 second delays when you open a context menu in explorer, or even open a non-executable? I sure as hell don't and this greatly disrupts my workflow, a major demotivator. You could say 'switch to linux', but I don't like freezing from fglrx or using 60hz refresh rate on a CRT, or klumsy KDE4. Wine has a lot of problems with Paint Shop Pro and QuArK.

Fixing Ubuntu waxed my GRUB *AND* NTLDR, which lead to Windows reinstallation... I probably won't be able to make a Linux ZIP file with permissions, unless I Live CD my way out of it.

Deadlines aren't release dates. Release dates i'm not sure when. The 8th looks like a good date, but it could be possible for it to come earlier.

Between this patch I also have to raise a new site with major assistance from Udi (for the new themes).
One of the main killers of OA is the unattractive and static site, so this is an important step to change.
Another killer of progress? Me, being a bottleneck of progress. I do not even have the ability to give SVN write access if I wanted to, and i'm willing to have a second or even third maintainer of the tree.

I don't understand which was the exact problem , but if you have already reinstalled windows and still have the ubuntu partition , you can recover the bootloader

- http://ubuntuguide.net/how-to-restore-grub-2-after-reinstalling-windows-xpvistawin7

She can but if time is short you are not happy about unnecessary problems you have to fix before you can get your hands on more important stuff.

Blender keeps crashing with new kde4. :(

Murphy's laws strike in the worst moment. -.-

The upgrade is always an operation that requires attention. The most rational thing to do is to create a VM in qemu , VirtualBox , VMware ... and try recreating the own working environment in which testing the upgrade. It's better spending time for this than after for recovering all the own work , at the risk of not beeing able to fully recover it.


Which version of blender ? Because if you are using the getdeb version , it's better apt-get-purging it and installing the version coming with the distribution.

will an RC2 patch come soon?

Yeah, when some of the bad bugs seen in the RC1 thread is fixed.

Regardless if it is the latest from blender.org or the one coming with my package system. It is because of faulty intel video card drivers.

Are you sure ? Because if drivers are faulty , all the 3D applications should not work properly. I think the problem is caused by the Xorg driver for Intel video card indeed. Anyway , did you already try to disable the kernel mode setting at boot replacing "splash" with "nosplash" and adding "915.modeset=0" to the grub boot commandline?

splash? I never use bootsplash.
Actually blender does not hardcrashing but it gets displaying issues after a while and dmesg reports massive problems.

Anyway I do not depend on this machine to keep on although the blender texture painting is bugged on PPC architectures.

Which kind of problems ? Sigfault or kernel oops ?