[Kde-games-devel] ANNOUNCE: Boson 0.9

[Andreas Beckermann]

Release of Boson 0.9, a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game for the K Desktop 
Environment.

The last release of Boson (0.8) was more than half a year ago, so we cannot 
list all of the changes here. However we will try to present the most 
interesting ones.

Two movies of Boson running got released - see http://boson.eu.org/movies.php 
These movies were made with the new movie grabbing feature. It is very (!) 
slow, but in conjunction with the powerful new scripting features, you can 
make really nice movies now.
These scripting features are the very first step on the long road towards AI.

Lighting support got added and can make the scene look a lot nicer. Lighting 
is somewhat experimental for the models, but terrain lighting looks very nice 
already.

The terrain rendering code has been completely rewritten. As a result we have 
very nice transitions now, and the texture data size got reduced by many 
MegaBytes.

Here is a (very) short list of the major (!) changes since Boson 0.8:
- Basic scripting features
- Movie grabbing possible (but _extremely_ slow)
- New terrain rendering code
- Lighting support for units and especially terrain
- Experimental level of detail
- New file format for savegames and playfields. We use a unified file format
  here, which removes a _lot_ of duplicated code (read: less bugs)
- Sound should be usable again. As it is mostly untested it is disbled by
  default. You can use --sound on command line to enable it.
- Faster pathfinding
- A few new units/models
You can see a longer, more complete list of changes at
http://boson.eu.org/announces/changelog-0.9.php


Requirements
You can find a list of hardware and software requirements at
http://boson.eu.org/info.php
Note that proper 3d acceleration is required.

Downloading and installing Boson
Source packages can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15087&release_id=194601

Installation instructions are at
http://boson.eu.org/install.php


The Boson Team
 http://boson.eu.org