Zenipex Library / News: Recent posts

This is a major change to the build system. Everything is centered around premake4. Supporting files have been fully integrated into the source tree. And binary releases for Linux are now a reality. For more details, checkout the readme for the release.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

This new release brings numerous bugfixes to the zenilib game engine, and little else. Given that there are no reductions to the API, you have no excuse to skip this update. Enjoy.

Zenilib is a lightweight but capable cross-platform game engine. Version 0.3.1.0 should be the best release yet, adding support for Xcode on MacOS X, improved databases for your game resources, and built in support for reconfiguring rendering options in-game. Please see the release notes for further details.

Camera field of view has finally been fixed, picking and reverse picking support has been added, and it is now capable of running in existing virtual machines. Additionally, a number of fixes and small consistency improvements have been performed. Also notable is that the documentation available at the website is vastly expanded and improved. If you are already using Zenilib, be sure to update. Otherwise, please give it a try.

Since 0.2.6.0, many small fixes have been applied, ranging from giving Quaternion a sane default value and making Camera a bit more stable to finally supporting the effects of the mirror tool in 3ds Max and making Texture color modulation consistent across OpenGL and Direct3D9. Additionally, Fog has been added and Materials now set the Color even when Lighting is disabled.

The Single Compilation Unit technique has been refined and made optional.
The Visual Studio projects have been moved up one directory so "working directory" settings are no longer required.
Collision detection functionality has been added for Lines, Rays, Line Segments, Spheres, Boxes, Infinite Cylinders, and Capsules.
A reasonable number of Widgets have been added for your convenience, including buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, sliders, and text boxes.
High Quality Timers have been added with approximately microsecond accuracy.
The rendering pipeline has been further abstracted away from OpenGL and Direct3D 9, with a number of matrix functions now done by Zenilib instead of being done by the each rendering library;
The Camera helper functions have been updated to use Quaternions resulting in cleaner and more correct code.
Directional lighting has finally been fixed in OpenGL.
Minor error handling issues with respect to threading and background loading have been resolved.
And last but not least, "support" for integration with Soar via SML has been added. If you don't know what this last one means, don't worry about it...

Many bug fixes and cleanups have been implemented.
Threading and networking support has been enhanced.
All code has been modified as needed to be 64-bit safe.
An x86/x64 project file for Visual Studio 2008 has been added.

This is the first release since I finished EECS 494, Game Development. Development was "officially" halted during that period in case anyone else was using my engine. Several moderate changes have been made, and all are important. Improvements to networking features have only begun.

~bazald

Changelog:

Visual Studio Project files have been improved - no more precompiled headers in Debug Mode and includes/inlines added;
Textures are now clamped by default - new option required in config/textures.txt for repeating textures;
Alt-F4 is now a mandatory quit mechanism in Gamestate_II;
mouse grabbing finally disabled by default with mouse hiding still enabled;
Net_Primitives added

This is perhaps the fastest and most stable release yet. Don't hesitate to download this one!

"Minor" bug fixes, such as a less then operator for Colors/Materials that did not provide a true total ordering. Speed ups, such as reducing the fps calculation in class Game from 5-6 ms per frame to <1 ms per frame. Also of note, is a serious reorganization of the compilation structure (though this hasn't been fully copied to the Linux Makefile yet).

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in making the 0.2.2.1 release. Hopefully I was less hasty in making this release. If you need stability, stick with 0.2.2.0.

There is an important fix for the Vector3f->Point3f conversion operator. Texture loading is improved slightly for TGA images in OpenGL. Sound_Source clipping functions have been renamed to clamping functions to better reflect their functionality. Also, Model should now be copy-safe.

This is a fairly minor release. It fixes sound loading in debug mode and changes certain things for clarity. Please see the change log for more details.

Note that new supporting files are recommended for use with this release. See http://zenipex.com/zenilib for details.

This is primarily a bugfix release. Support for loading Ogg Vorbis files for use with OpenAL/ALUT has been added. All DLLs for which I have source code have been updated or simply recompiled by me, personally, using Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1. These are available on my personal website, http://zenipex.com/zenilib/

If you cannot install VC8SP1 and have been using the previous version, do not upgrade. There is not yet much incentive to upgrade as relatively few changes have been made and you will not be able to run anything you compile! Talk to your sysadmin and get him/her to look into installing the latest service pack, or at the very least, the runtimes from the latest service pack.... read more

Not too much to report. For the most part, if it worked for you before, it should still work now. If it didn't quite work before, hopefully one of the small bugfixes will do something for you.

There is a new Matrix4f class, a new Quaternion class, an upgrade to Font_GL class, and numerous bug-fixes and GCC compilation fixes.

Notes:
This was an important break from the last version. I have added many new features, changed some default values, some arguments orders, etc...

Many thanks go to Alex Kerfoot for many of these suggestions and more. Thanks also to everyone who suggested Sprites and simplified 2D-rendering options. I named the EZ2D helper file after Matt Gilgenbach's engine that he developed in order to teach Camp CAEN several years ago.... read more

Now that I have a few days off, improvements are making their way into the engine again. The interface to the Sound system has been greatly improved. Also, a networking interface has been added that supports both TCP and UDP sockets through SDL_net.

Changes to the font rendering process and to the model matrix stack function names were added in 0.1.1.0. Furthermore, functionality was added to allow one to render a vertex buffer multiple times more efficiently.

An error in the disabling of textures was fixed for Direct3D 9 rendering in 0.1.1.1.

The first release of the Zenipex Library, a lightweight, cross-platform 3D game development framework, has just been made.

The engine provides a gamestate stack. It provides a general purpose control loop for receiving input, performing logic, and rendering. It provides reasonably good support for window creation and input handling through SDL. OpenGL and Direct3D 9 instantiation, while full featured, could use more testing in multiple environments (particularly with limited color palette choices).... read more