[axiomengine-developers] Axiom Hobbiton (0.7.1.0) RC 1 is now available for download!

[Michael C. <cum...@gm...>]

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