Organizing the future

This year RoR has reached a critical size, and my dwindling free time and interest requires a radical change of the development process of RoR.
I can not continue to manage everything and release as I did before, with the great help of Thomas.
We need experienced volunteers to continue the work done:

• we need developers and build a professional developers community
  
• we need to federate and manage contents
  
• we need to improve documentation and user interaction

Teams have started to assemble toward these goals, but we need more fresh blood, especially people experienced with working-on and managing large OpenSource projects.

Thanks for your help.

RoR nominated for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

Thanks to all the fans that voted in the first round, RoR managed to get in the list of the ten best projects of Sourceforge in the "Best Project for Gamers" category. Wow!
Now its time for the the second voting round, to victory!
So vote now for Rigs of Rods in the "Best Project for Gamers" category before July, 20th.
Winning will give more publicity to the project and attract more developers and artists.
Thanks for your votes.

Public presentation of RoR

The organizers of the 10th "Libre Software Meeting" (or in french: Rencontre Mondiales du Logiciel Libre - RMLL) have kindly invited me to talk about Rigs of Rods at Nantes, France, on July, 10. The presentation will be in french.
See you there!

Bug fix: RoR 0.36.1

There was several bugs in the original release of 0.36 that mandated a bugfix release.
The main problems were:

• The Visual Studio redistribuable included in the installer was of the wrong Service Pack version.
• Some compilation flags added SSE instructions to the code, which are incompatible with older AMD processors, like the Duron.
• The game crashed when vegetation was enabled.
• There was visual glitches in some terrains and vehicles.

All these bugs should be gone with version 0.36.1.

Enjoy!

Rigs of Rods 0.36 is out!

Finally after almost 11 months!
This release was pretty hard to finish to say the least. I hope you will enjoy the hard work.
It includes many new vehicles and terrains. Some are still in beta state and I thank their authors for allowing me to include them in the release. I hope they will forgive me for the occasional bugs and broken taillights that may arise from the rushed release process. I hope these brilliant vehicles and terrains will encourage more creations for the game.

The new features are numerous, the most visible are:

• Environment map effects (chrome effects)
• Shader support (with damage map)
• Completely new ground friction physics: now more realistic than ever
• Custom sounds
  
• Better support of flexbodies
• New user interface
• Files reorganization : now all the files you need to access are in your "My Documents\Rigs of Rods" directory - no more in the Program Files directory.
• And much more...
  

Thanks to all the people that helped to the realization of this version.
Special thanks for Box5diesel, Lifter and Sneer for their prolific and very high quality work.
Thanks to Thomas for his very hard work helping me pushing this release.
Thanks to all the donators, volunteers and moderators of the forums.

Note that from now on, the releases will be hosted on sourceforge :
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=252198

Enjoy!

Rigs of Rods is going Open Source

I decided to publish the source code of Rigs of Rods 0.36 under the GPLv3 licence.
Why this decision?

• To attract and motivate more volunteers and contributors.
• To give us some oxygen. The project is too big to maintain for just Thomas and me. Also, we have the desire to turn the page and work on new projects, possibly related to RoR, but I don't want to "kill" RoR by doing so.
• To give back to all the Open Source projects that gave us the possibility to use their code under the LGPL, like Ogre3D.
• To be able to use the resources offered by SourceForge for Open Source projects.
• To ease the porting of RoR to the Linux platform.

This will have no influences on the release of 0.36, which is close to be finished (the code is finished, and we are selecting and testing the contents. Unfortunately my computer decided this was the right time to have a hardware malfunction, and I'm finishing with half my RAM!).

There will be a more formal Open Source announcement to build the hype once 0.36 is released.

Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel

After 10 months of gestation, we are coming close to the next release, which I estimate will be ready in about a couple of weeks. I hope the wait will be worth it, with many new features.
I would like to thank the very talented modders that help us to put the final touch to this release.

During this time, Rigs of Rods has got more and more popular, with more than 200.000 unique downloads of version 0.35. That's an incredible number for such a small project!

Thanks for your patience and dedication.

Status update

It's been some time since the last update, so I think it's time to give some info on what's going on in RoR.

July was very quiet and did not see much progress. The highlight in August was the visit of Thomas in Paris, it was the first time we met in real life, and it was a great weekend, even if I forgot to select the Caelum sky during his stay.

Now the development is picking up speed with a huge reorganization of the source code, contents and build system, as well as major new features.

Thomas is helping me streamline the whole release process with his Python wizardry. The ultimate goal is to switch to an online installation and update system to simplify the maintenance of the game, and allow more frequent updates.

The focus of the new versions will be on mods and modders: I have no more time to manage contents, so I will concentrate on the code and let the mod community manage the contents with new tools for content management.

Feature-wise, there will be many goodies for modders like full flexmesh support, shaders with reflexion and damage maps, fully customizable sounds, and better friction physics!

There is still a lot of work left to finish this overhaul, and not much free time left in our busy lives, so I can't give any release date for now.

Thanks for your patience.

In the press again

There was a page about RoR in the june issue of the french magazine MicroSim. The article mentions that a full test of RoR will come in a later issue!
As I'm french too, I guess we can all chant "Cororico".
About RoR 0.36, I know its coming slowly, but I hope it will be finished this summer. With this release we will try to setup a new installation system that will allow faster, easier, and more frequent updates in the future. (If all goes as planned!)

RoR 0.35 for MacOSX and Linux ready

Check it out at the repo!
Also, modders can start tinkering with the new feature patch to prepare the future 0.36 flexbody vehicles.