Hi all,

I'd like to announce the very first release of AresEd. Before getting too excited however I'd like to warn everyone that this is still an alpha release. It is far from a finished product and there are many known (and very likely unknown) bugs. It is also not feature complete.

Now what is it? AresEd is a 3D game creation kit based on Crystal Space and CEL (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). It is Open Source (MIT license) and 100% free software. With AresEd it will be possible to make full working 3D games without any coding. All from within the AresEd visual editor. AresEd is *not* a modeller however. Before you can use AresEd you still have to use Blender (for example) to make your 3D models. AresEd can import these models and allows the game designer to place them in the world and additionally the game designer can define game logic.

Game logic is defined using state machines (the CEL quest concept) and the CEL message system. Objects in the world can be associated to 'entities' and entities can react to messages and in return send out other messages. With associated quests (state machines) you can 'program' the entity to behave different depending on various situations. In future versions of AresEd it will also be possible to attach python scripts to entities for more advanced game logic possibilities but the intention is that as much as possible can be done using the graphical quest editor.

As I said earlier, AresEd is not complete. Here is a list of a few major features that are still lacking:

• There is as of yet no support for sound.
• The actor system is not really powerful yet. For now AresEd is mostly uses
  for single player/first person view games.
• The physics actor is not usable right now for real games as it gets stuck
  and unstable very easily. It is mainly included for demonstrations purposes
  and it needs a lot more work. Note that the simple collision detection based
  actor works much better and is suitable for small games. The latest Google
  Summer of Code brought a new Bullet based physics plugin in Crystal Space and
  this one includes a nice physics based actor. Next version of AresEd will use
  that one.
• Support for the CEL AI system and pathfinding.
• Here is the list of known issues:
  http://code.google.com/p/ares/issues/list

But other than that it is actually possible to make simple games using AresEd. Included with this release there are five examples. Of these 'mysterygame' is the most game-like example. It includes a puzzle that you have to solve before a gate can be fully opened.

In addition to AresEd this package also includes a game player called Ares. While you can play your game directly from within AresEd, if you want to distribute your game it will be easier to do that with Ares instead.

The Ares project page can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/ares/  You can also download Windows and Linux binaries from there.

The linux binary is temporary. It was built on a 64-bit kubuntu and as such might not be usable on other distributions. In the near future we will provide more compatible binaries. In the mean time it might be easier to compile Ares from Source. You can find instructions on how to Build Ares here: http://code.google.com/p/ares/wiki/AresBuilding

After installation there are two executables: AresEd and Ares. Pressing 'F1' in AresEd will bring up online help.

Please let me know if you find any issues (that are not already listed in the list of issues above). Also if you have questions on how to use AresEd then feel free to ask me.

I'd like to stress that AresEd is in heavy development. This is an early version and it is likely that a lot will change in the future still.

Additionally I'm looking for people who want to help develop on AresEd. I think it is a very interesting project and there is lots of opportunity for other people to help with development.

Greetings,

Hi all,

I'm the author of Crystal Space and CEL and I'm in the process of starting a new game (+editor) project. The project is called Ares (and the editor AresEd).

The first focus of this project is to make an editor. You can compare this editor to editors as used by other games like Fallout3 and Oblivion. In this video blog entry you can see a demonstration on how it currently works. Note that this editor is not finished but it is already doing some nice things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3wlNbHheY4

The second part of this project is to work on the game logic. Most work for this has already been done. The remaining task is to put things together and work on some of the missing features. You can see a demonstration on the CEL entity system (which is going to be used by this project) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H6UnKwuzAM

The third part of this project is to make an actual game. There are some ideas about this but everything is open. Also the idea is that this editor+game logic will be very general and generic so that you can make a lot of different games with it. The ability to mod games will also be very important.

And of course, all this is Open Source and Free Software. I'm looking for a number of people to help me with this. First I need developers. Having C++ experience is recommended as Crystal Space and CEL are written in C++. You should be willing to learn and step in a big project. Of course we will not let you sit in the cold with that. There is an active IRC channel (#CrystalSpace at FreeNode) where there are always CS developers on and you can get a lot of help there. This page lists a few of the things that have to be done but there is much more.

Of course I will also need artists. For 3D and animation artists I prefer people that can work with Blender as we have very good support for converting blender models to Crystal Space. But also 2D and sound artists are needed.

One of the most important features that I need is motivated people! I think that this is a really exciting new project and I hope that the people that will help me with this are equally motivated.

Visit http://code.google.com/p/ares/ for more information. If you are interested in helping then contact me at jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com

Thanks!

I recently installed PS 0.5 on four very different laptops with some success. Basically I had these systems (all with Windows XP or Vista):

- An AMD64 Laptop with an ATI X700 Radeon Mobility (1gig memory)
- An Intel Centrino laptop with an nVidia Quadro NVS 160M (4 gigs memory)
- An Intel laptop with an Intel GMA 940 (2 gigs memory)
- An Intel laptop with an older nVidia card that I don't remember (512 megs memory)

On all those systems I had lots of in-game stability issues and graphical glitches. For the ATI laptop I fixed those by installing the drivers from http://www.omegadrivers.net/ . These drivers are high quality and work really well.

For the nVidia laptops I used the drivers from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ . Again using these drivers solved a lot of the issues and made PS run really well.

For the Intel GMA card I didn't yet find a good set of drivers so PS is still not running on that laptop.

On the laptop with only 512 Megs memory PS is very laggy.

So basically: get the latest drivers even if you can't use the official ones (due to laptop vendor specific drivers that are required).

Greetings,

Finally it starts! The Apricot team has been selected and is ready to make a smashing game using Crystal Space and Blender.

Apricot is a joint effort between Crystal Space and Blender to create a fully open game with professional quality. All data and code will be published and can be used in other projects (Creative Commons license). In order to make the high level of quality possible that we are aiming for in this game we will have to work hard on Crystal Space for new features like a better animation system and a better renderer. So in this way, supporting Apricot also means supporting PlaneShift!

In order to support this Apricot project (and support Crystal Space!) you can pre-order the DVD. This DVD will contain material like the game for Linux, Windows, and MacOS/X. All sources. All artwork and also the original sources used to make this artwork. And also documentation, tutorials and video material. This pre-order is very important for us as it gives us the needed funds to make sure the project can go for six months. You can get more information and pre-order information at http://apricot.blender.org.

Thanks for your support!

Crystal Core is an Open Source FPS/quest based game written with Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer. The game is based on a science fiction story. The player and his or her companions crash on an alien planet where they discover that the original intelligent inhabitants are now extinct due to an invasion of semi-primitive aliens from a distant planet. Your goal is to destroy all aliens or either to escape the planet alive. To accomplish either of these goals you have to use alien technology and try to interface it with the broken ship that you arrived with.

This is a tech demo only. There is not much to do in this version. You can walk around in two levels, fight two creatures and solve a small quest to access a locked part of the ship. That's all. See the http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Crystal_Core site for more information about the game, a few screenshots, and also binaries for Windows and 32-bit GNU/Linux.


Greetings,

In one and a half hours (that's 11:00 GMT+2) Talad will talk on the Crystal Space conference. You should be able to watch his talk live on streaming video. Check out the Crystal Space site (top news item) for the url to the two streams (for the parallel sessions): http://www.crystalspace3d.org

Note that we will record the talk and make it available for download later.

Greetings,

Fixed link formatting. --Kary

I have here two performance tips that may be useful for people who have problems with performance in PlaneShift.

1. Add \'-nolightmapping\' on the commandline. You either have to run PlaneShift from the commandline (cmd.exe) or else add this option to the icon of psclient (properties). The effect of this option is that all lightmapped objects (most geometry) will be fully bright (no shadows). This saves some memory as the lightmaps are no longer loaded on disk and it improves performance a lot (around 50% depending on hardware). Of course you will no longer be able to see day/night cycles and some of the nice parts of PS may no longer look as nice.

2. Edit data/config/r3dopengl.cfg and go to the line that contains \'Video.OpenGL.TextureDownsample\'. That option is by default set to 0. If you set it to 1 or 2 then all textures will be scaled down. i.e. with value 1 the textures will be scaled down to one quarter of the size (from 256x256 to 128x128 for example). With value set to 2 textures will be scaled down again. This setting makes all textures a lot more blurry and less detailed but it does save some memory space and also speeds up rendering a bit.

Greetings,