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.

RoR 0.35

I'm pretty happy with what we got with this new version.
New features:

• Turbojet physics: includes a superb Mig-25 made by Adeodat to illustrate this. And checkout the optional heat haze effect if you have a good video card... Airbrakes physics are also added to tame the beast.
• Large terrains: you can make terrains as big as 327 km x 327 km. A 100 km x 100 km terrain is included, which is 1:1 scale of the Grenoble region (France). Perfect for airplanes!
• A new physics operator that allows to rigidify beams where trussing is difficult or impossible. Useful for landing gears and other complex and delicate structures.
  
• Improved cameras: better chasing camera, better fixed camera for airplanes, better inside camera (btw, some modders got the wiki wrong and this breaks the new inside camera - check if your "camera" statement follows the wiki specifications). You can also specify rigidity parameters for internal camera.
  
• Mesh wheels: the ultimate wheels graphics quality is now possible. A cool Dodge Charger beta version by Bonehead demonstrates its use. More to come later in this department...
• Night maps (beta), to be used in Caelum mode, and changing the time to night time.
• A new, textured character by kevinmce, with more to come later...
  
• A monorail by Thomas, a formula one by Akoss, über cool foaming Panther firefighting vehicles by Lenni, oh my!
  

Optimizations:

• Maps and vehicles loading cache: this will reduce loading time to almost nothing. Note that the first time you will start RoR after installing it, it will build the cache, and this will take some time, so don't panic at the black screen and let it finish. The next starts will be faster.
  
• Texture compression: massive switch to the DXT compressed textures. This saves tons of video memory, and now RoR runs easily on a video card with 128MB of VRAM. Modders are encouraged to use this format too for their releases. See the wiki.
• Simplified configurator.
  

Bugfixes:

• Less shaking overall. Now the only shaking you will see is either in very large terrains (we are looking at it), or for vehicles that have a physics stability issues (lightly built frames or link resonance)
• Various bugfixes...
  

About the vehicle set included in the release: I could not make a complete review of the new mods, some of which seems to be really outstanding, but my time is too limited to manage that, I can not keep up with everything. The same applies to possibly existing updates of included vehicles. I also removed some previously included vehicles to save space, as the archive becomes larger and larger. So I'm sorry if people feel bad about this, its purely due to technical constraints from my part. I will try to find a better selection process the next time.

RoR 0.35 is 88 196 757 bytes. We may have some trouble getting Repo mirrors running smoothly as the bandwidth grows to improbable levels and our hosting companies begin to complain... Of course you can also try the "classic" backup site.

In case of problem, I exceptionally uploaded the installer on file sharing websites. These two links are the only official shared files for RoR 0.35:

• mihd.net
• mediafire

Enjoy!