[Kde-games-devel] ANNOUNCE: Boson 0.11

[Andreas Beckermann]

Release of Boson 0.11, a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game for the K Desktop 
Environment.

For this release, the primary focus has been to finally get the release 
out ;-)
For nearly the whole time since the last release in early 2004 both main Boson 
developers have been too busy with various non-Boson things to concentrate 
for long enough on an actual release. However during that time period new 
features got constantly added, so the list of changes is very long for this 
version.

Probably the most visible change is the port to libufo.
libufo (http://libufo.sf.net) is a widget toolkit for OpenGL, that enables 
Boson to draw buttons, labels and other widgets directly into the OpenGL 
scene, instead of using a separated area. An installation of libufo is not 
necessary, as Boson provides its own copy of this library.
Note that we still use both, KDE and Qt and will continue to do so. KDE and Qt 
are used in Boson for a lot of things, not only the GUI.

Another much apparent change is the implementation of realistic looking water.
While Boson 0.10 used simply textures only, this release provides a dedicated 
water engine, even supporting shaders and reflections.

In the technical area, Boson has received an game-event subsystem that makes 
the game more modular, event driven and will ease the development of an AI.
Furthermore a network synchronization protocol has been developed, that allows 
to detect and even fix out-of-sync errors in network games most of the time. 
With this addition, network games are supposed to be fully operational now.

Further changes include:
* Many new effects, such as daylight and wind
* Much improved pathfinder
* Winning conditions
* Simple terrain LOD (level of detail)
* Flying units have their own moving quirks
* Many new neutral models such as trees
* Many much less apparent changes

For a longer, though still incomplete list see
http://boson.eu.org/announces/changelog-0.11.php

As a special highlight this release features an installer package with a 
precompiled binary of Boson 0.11.
This binary is linked statically against Qt, KDE, and several other libraries, 
meaning that you do not require an installation of these libraries. This 
package is still very experimental, however because of the amount of 
libraries Boson depends on, it is now the recommended way of installing 
Boson.
At the moment there is an installer for 32bit x86 Linux platforms only. It is 
not known whether it runs on other platforms (non x86 platforms will 
definitely not work).


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=353607
Installation instructions are at http://boson.eu.org/install.php


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