Week 13/2014: Savegame merge
Last week DaniJ's work branch was merged and we entered Candidate phase for 1.14.
As DaniJ has been talking about in previous posts, the crux of the new savegame functionality is a new container (package) format for savegames that allows Doomsday to understand and handle them directly. Previously the game plugins have implemented game saving entirely on their own, with the engine seeing only a single binary blob of unknown contents written to a file. Now these blobs are contained within a native Doomsday package with additional human-readable metadata. In the future, we can include more data in the package, for instance a small screenshot at the time when the save was made.
After the merge, though, there were a few hiccups related to UI and deployment of the new savegame conversion components. These should now be dealt with, however be sure to let us know if you run into problems regarding savegames.
I also applied some improvements to the bloom effect. The bloom shader now uses more samples for blurring, which means the effect is smoother overall when used with the new default "rend-bloom-dispersion" value of 1.0. If you have been running previous unstable builds with bloom, you should set this cvar to its new default value (for instance in the Renderer Appearance sidebar).
We are currently targeting 1.14.0 stable to be released on Sunday (April 6th), however this depends on how many serious issues need fixing / are discovered in the meantime.
As DaniJ has been talking about in previous posts, the crux of the new savegame functionality is a new container (package) format for savegames that allows Doomsday to understand and handle them directly. Previously the game plugins have implemented game saving entirely on their own, with the engine seeing only a single binary blob of unknown contents written to a file. Now these blobs are contained within a native Doomsday package with additional human-readable metadata. In the future, we can include more data in the package, for instance a small screenshot at the time when the save was made.
After the merge, though, there were a few hiccups related to UI and deployment of the new savegame conversion components. These should now be dealt with, however be sure to let us know if you run into problems regarding savegames.
I also applied some improvements to the bloom effect. The bloom shader now uses more samples for blurring, which means the effect is smoother overall when used with the new default "rend-bloom-dispersion" value of 1.0. If you have been running previous unstable builds with bloom, you should set this cvar to its new default value (for instance in the Renderer Appearance sidebar).
We are currently targeting 1.14.0 stable to be released on Sunday (April 6th), however this depends on how many serious issues need fixing / are discovered in the meantime.
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