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Collection of Updates 2009-07-03 21:42:10

Recently some progress has been made to Simple Doom Editor. GhostlyDeath has decided to rejoin the team so hopefully things will go at a moderately slow pace instead of... moderately slow. At any rate we have discussed various ways in which plugins can be made and I think if someone wants to develop a plugin in C++ things will be more or less automatic.

I've also done a little bit of work for Skulltag itself. Having recently been annoyed by pistol skirmishes in the team selection rooms in Skulltag, I've decided to put an end to them. Until the player is assigned a team, they will have absolutely no weapons. This will require some modification of the levels themselves in order to work properly, but I think the end result will be worth it.

Speaking of Skulltag, Doomseeker is due for a new release soon. We're currently working on some protocol details before and the release will be synchronized with the testing version of Skulltag which implements said protocol. Hopefully the changes will allow easier testing of Skulltag on platforms other than Windows.

For anyone following the development of my little known Wolfenstein 3D port, I still haven't really touched it since vacation. The project is not a high priority and mostly is there to give me something to code while I'm using my laptop. The menu code rewrite is almost completely done and I already have improved some things. Namely save slots will be added when needed like ZDoom.

Now for the part unrelated to development! Recently there has been a lot of debate on the OpenGL and Software renderer in Skulltag. Namely that one has a greater freelook range. I've really always though the OpenGL renderer was a mistake. Before it was introduced Skulltag had a small but wonderful community. Maybe I like small circles of people, but I don't think anyone would deny that the community was better then. Although 96b was a fairly buggy release, it does not compare at all to the release of 97b which had the OpenGL renderer. In fact 97b was so bad that it seems Carnevil fled from the project. If I recall correctly a large number of the bugs had to due with the renderer differences.

Although it was not intended to split the community, there is no denying that the two renderer had a different set of features. In fact at this point they have a different set of mapping features! This means that the community did split already releasing a slew of mods only compatible with one renderer. Sure you can argue that the OpenGL renderer brought Torr on board, but once you have a cut like this the scar will forever remain. This is why I consider the OpenGL renderer the biggest mistake in Skulltag. Skulltag is loaded with a large amount of mistakes, but most of them had little to no permanent impact. There is no solution to this problem now, fixing it means losing a valuable member of the team and half the community which is equally, if not more, unacceptable.

That's all I have for now, hopefully the next update will be later this month (history says it will be somewhere between the 20th and the 29th).

 

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