1.9.0-beta4 Release Notes
<i>This post was originally made by <b>skyjake</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the categories: Beta 4, Releases, Version 1.9.</i>
The main purpose of the 1.9 series is to revise the internal architecture of the engine to make it possible to freeze engine/plugin API for easier game lib development, break unnecessary dependencies between the engine and the plugins (including the games), and full support for Windows, Mac OS X, and *nix platforms.
Compared to the previous beta, 1.9.0-beta4 introduces a host of improvements and fixes. A lot of development effort (and time!) has gone into this release. However, we have many things to do before we are at 1.9.0 final. In the future, I would like that releases are made a bit more often, with a smaller set of changes. I expect to see at least a Beta 5 release during the summer, and most likely Beta 6 later on.
The introduction of the Map Updates API has caused the largest number of changes in this release. While DMU removes the games' direct dependencies to map data and provides an efficient notification mechanism for the engine to learn of map data changes, it means that a set of new bugs has been introduced into the code when the old game code has been converted to work with the DMU API. We have found and fixed a large portion of these bugs, but it is likely that we haven't caught all of them. Please, submit a bug report if you encounter strange error messages or odd game behavior.
On Windows, I recommend installing Beta 4 into an empy folder. If you are using OS X, you might want to consider deleting your old <tt>~/Library/Application Support/Snowberry/conf/</tt> folder, so that the new default preferences for the Snowberry launcher take effect.
The OS X version has improved a great deal. There were numerous endianness problems in model rendering and other code. In this release almost everything should be working correctly. The Snowberry launcher has been tweaked to look a bit more like a Mac application (although it is still quite far for perfect). Only PowerPC binaries are provided at this time; a universal binary for 10.4 will be available when the libraries that Doomsday depends on are all available in the universal format. In the future, there will be the PPC-only 10.3 build and the universal 10.4 build available separately.
The complete list of changes thus far for 1.9.0 can be found in /Docs/ChangeLog.txt
The main purpose of the 1.9 series is to revise the internal architecture of the engine to make it possible to freeze engine/plugin API for easier game lib development, break unnecessary dependencies between the engine and the plugins (including the games), and full support for Windows, Mac OS X, and *nix platforms.
Compared to the previous beta, 1.9.0-beta4 introduces a host of improvements and fixes. A lot of development effort (and time!) has gone into this release. However, we have many things to do before we are at 1.9.0 final. In the future, I would like that releases are made a bit more often, with a smaller set of changes. I expect to see at least a Beta 5 release during the summer, and most likely Beta 6 later on.
The introduction of the Map Updates API has caused the largest number of changes in this release. While DMU removes the games' direct dependencies to map data and provides an efficient notification mechanism for the engine to learn of map data changes, it means that a set of new bugs has been introduced into the code when the old game code has been converted to work with the DMU API. We have found and fixed a large portion of these bugs, but it is likely that we haven't caught all of them. Please, submit a bug report if you encounter strange error messages or odd game behavior.
On Windows, I recommend installing Beta 4 into an empy folder. If you are using OS X, you might want to consider deleting your old <tt>~/Library/Application Support/Snowberry/conf/</tt> folder, so that the new default preferences for the Snowberry launcher take effect.
The OS X version has improved a great deal. There were numerous endianness problems in model rendering and other code. In this release almost everything should be working correctly. The Snowberry launcher has been tweaked to look a bit more like a Mac application (although it is still quite far for perfect). Only PowerPC binaries are provided at this time; a universal binary for 10.4 will be available when the libraries that Doomsday depends on are all available in the universal format. In the future, there will be the PPC-only 10.3 build and the universal 10.4 build available separately.
The complete list of changes thus far for 1.9.0 can be found in /Docs/ChangeLog.txt