Chaotic Rage 1.8 is now available! This release brings many new features.

Before I discuss the changes, I’d like to thank the three contributors who made this release possible.

Igor Živković (igzivkov) provided a couble of patches, Enjgine has been very vocal with the bugtracker as well as providing artwork, and our newest project member, Magnus Espersson (esper) has provided more than 70 commits towards this release. Thank you!

This is another big release. Over about two months we did 278 commits which is exactly double the 139 commits in 1.7! This is really quite incredible, and only possible through the additional assistance I receved throughout the development of this release.

Most of the changes in this release are bug fixes. A huge nuumber of memory leaks, NULL-pointer dereferences, and other issues have been fixed. A lot of this work was completed by esper. There were also various small build improvements and many many fixes to lint errors found by tools such as cppcheck.

New features include basic internationalizaion (i18n) support, although this is still not really usable yet. We changed all of the font rendering to use UTF-8 and to use a font which supports non-ascii characters. Bullet physics was upgraded to 2.82 and there were also various related performance improvements. A number of small usability imrpvements have been added. We’ve added a help screen (F1) whist ingame, as well as in-game camera angle changing. Some networking bugs have been fixed too.

Graphically, we’ve now got a suite of new maps which look heaps better. Shaddowing works properly in a lot more cases now as well. Maps gained support for multiple heightmaps, as well as no heightmaps at all, such as the caves map. A lot of visual bugs have been fixed, and the game looks heaps better in this release. We also changed the minimum version of OpenGL which is required from 3.1 to 3.0.

A lot of the scriptiong code got an overhaul. There is still some improvements needed here, but it’s heaps better already. We’re now using hte excellent LuaBridge library for a lot of the Lua interface code. This allows class objects to be passed back-and-forth between C++ and Lua, so Lua code can now manipulate the game world in many new ways. There is even a new gametype which uses these new features to implement a basic map builder. Use the ‘M’ key to open the map creation dialog.

I think that’s everything. Wow, what a release! Quick, go download it now!