From: Michael C. <cum...@gm...> - 2006-09-18 09:12:29
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The Axiom team is proud to announce that we have finally been able to provide the community with a download. Being the first in a series of releases, this is your chance to make sure this will be a very stable and useable release. Please take the time to download and work with it in your projects. Of course, report any issues on the forums or the SourceForge bugtracker you may have so they can be corrected before the final release. We are planning to have an RC2 in two weeks time and a final release 2 weeks after that. There are four different packages available in this release; full, binary, source and media. The full package includes all source and binaries. The source package includes all source files, dependencies and build system. The binary package has just the binary assemblies and dependencies in a ready to run form. There is only one binary package for Windows/DX initially, a cross platform SDL binary package will be added soon. The media package contains the media folder and is a requirement for both the binary and source packages. The media folder is much small than in the past as we have trimmed a lot of the fluff from it. The files are available from the SourceForge Release System. This release has been codenamed 'hobbiton'. Now, those of you that have been paying attention are going to ask 'I thought the next release was codenamed 'bree'? To quote one of my favorite non-LOTR characters, 'Let me axplain...noh, there is too much, let me summup'. The bree branch was started with some very large goals, updating to Ogre 1.06, .Net 2.0Collections, new Plugin System, and upgrade to MDX 2.0. After a year of development, we were nowhere near being able to release, let alone have a compilable system. Even though we were progressing on the goal of updating to OGRE compatibility, it was hard to gauge where we were since the source couldn't compile. This produced several side effects, one it was demoralizing to everyone who was contributing to the project as there was no visible results, second the community tends to think the project is dead because forward momentum is so slow. I decided that with the beta of XNA Game Studio and the XNA Framework that the community at large needed to know that Axiom was not a dead project and that it is a very viable solution for XNA development (yes there is an XNA renderer under way, I'll get to that ). It is still a good solution for OpenGL and DirectX and will continue to be. However there is an obvious opportunity to gain a lot of forward momentum by piggy-backing on the newness of the XNA Framework. So about a month ago, we backtracked and started development on hobbiton. We came to the realization that it was going to be very difficult to get bree to a relatively stable state. However we couldn't ignore some of the advancements that had been made in bree. So we decided that the best place to start was the last known revision to work reliably. This just so happened to be the last release that leed had put out. After several weeks of search out patches and fixing up bugs we now have a fairly stable code base to release. There are several things to note about this release, the biggest is that is is essentially the same as 0.7.0.0 with some bugfixes and minor improvements. That means that if you have been working with the SVN Head, your code will break against hobbiton. We do apologize for this, but it will be a needed step in order for us to make major leaps forward in a very short time. By taking this step we have been able to get ALL the demos working on .Net and Mono! So all of the namespace changes, most of the OGRE updates, the plugin architecture, and other changes were not moved back into hobbiton to ensure a nice fast stable release. So what happens now? hobbiton will replace SVN HEAD after the final release and bug fixes and minor updates will occur there. As for bree, it will be rebased on the hobbiton source and all OGRE 1.06 updates reapplied. The plugin system, updates to the math library and .Net 2.0 collections will be researched for viability and performance. The OGRE updating will move on a slightly different track however. Feature sets will be identified and updated, this should allow us to make progress and keep the system building and the demos running. So what's all this noise about XNA? I'll attempt to answer your questions about using Axiom and XNA here. First lets discuss the XNA framework. There are two platforms for XNA, Windows and Xbox. The Xbox platform is not yet available, which is good, because there are some heavy requirements in order to run on it. For the Windows platform we are already working on a PlatformManager and renderer for the XNA Framework. There is no completion date for this yet, but it is a priority. There are some technical hurdles to overcome, the biggest being XNA does not have a fixed-function pipeline, so Axiom's fixed-function pipeline needs to be converted to the equivalent shader model. Doable, but tedious. For the Xbox, we have the same issues as for Windows, plus there is no support for P/Invoke, which basically means we can't use DevIL. So in short, Windows XNA will be available in the short term, with minor changes to the base code. However, there will be a longer and more intensive development effort to support the Xbox platform. So enjoy this release and let us know if there are any issues, we'll get them corrected as soon as possible! The Axiom Team http://axiomengine.sf.net |