News and Updates on the Rigs of Rods truck simulator, based on an advanced soft-body physics engine.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

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.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

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:
Enjoy!