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NEWS.md

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Changes in xoreos version 0.0.6

The tutorial in Knights of the Old Republic is now partially playable: the PC can collect their belongings, put on their gear, let Trask open the first door, open the second door and engage in mock combat.

Knights of the Old Republic II now lets you skip the prologue, showing off a bit of the intro.

Jade Empire now has background music and a preliminary character generation menu.

And as always, this release includes a ton of code quality changes, bug fixes and initial implementations that are user-invisible for now. These include:

  • Partial implementations of ActionScript and Scaleform GFx for Dragon Age menus
  • Partial implementations of XACT WaveBanks and SoundBanks for Jade Empire
  • Partial implementations of FMOD SampleBanks and Events for Dragon Age: Origins
  • Partial implementations of Wwise SoundBanks for Dragon Age II
  • WebM (Matroska + VPx) support for the Enhanced Edition of Neverwinter Nights
  • Support for big-endian GFF4 files found in console ports
  • Support for resource files found in mobile ports
  • Support for more Neverwinter Nights 2 structures

In an attempt to modernize a bit, xoreos now requires a C++11-capable compiler. This should hopefully not be a huge problem.

Changes in xoreos version 0.0.5

The two Knights of the old Republic games gained animation support, partially working character creators, ingame menus, PC walking with walkmesh and trigger evaluation, and preliminary conversations. They are now the most implemented games in xoreos, overtaking Neverwinter Nights.

Neverwinter Nights received a fix in the animation system. Animations are now correctly scaled with the height of the creature. Heads don't fly off of elves anymore when they yawn, for example. The character creator was also partially implemented.

Jade Empire now has an initial implementation for its main menu and lightmap textures are correctly loaded.

And as always, this release includes a ton of code quality changes, bug fixes and initial implementations that are user-invisible for now.

Changes in xoreos version 0.0.4

Neverwinter Nights now shows speech bubbles for conversation one-liners, as used for cutscenes, bark strings and short NPC dialogues. Additionally, the premium modules BioWare sold for Neverwinter Nights, including the three that come with the Diamond Edition, can now be properly loaded and started.

An oversight in the handling of the texture fonts used in Neverwinter Nights and the two Knights of Old Republic games has been fixed. This oversight broke rendering of certain characters, most prominently of those used in eastern European languages and the "smart" single quotation mark that's used instead of an apostrophe in some strings found in the French versions.

Moreover, this release includes a lot of user-invisible code documentation and quality fixes.

Changes in xoreos version 0.0.3

All targeted games now feature a working script system, with game scripts being fired for the start of a campaign or module, when entering and leaving areas, and when clicking on in-game object. The singular exception is the Nintendo DS game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, which doesn't seem to feature any scripts at all.

The vast majority of engine functions, the functions that are called by the scripts and that do the actual work of tracking and changing the game state, are still missing, though. Per game there are about 850 functions (with some overlap) that need to be implemented. We currently have about 90, per game, of these written and working within xoreos. Moreover, many of the functions still missing depend on features not yet implemented.

Apart from the script system changes, 0.0.3 also comes with support for reflective environment mapping in Neverwinter Nights and the two Knights of the Old Republic games. The "metallic" armor and area parts that were rendered rendered transparent in xoreos are now properly reflective. This can be seen, for example, in the Sith troopers in Knights of the Old Republic, in various plate armor worn by NPC in Neverwinter Nights, as well as the metallic floors on the planet of Taris and the icy wastes of Cania. For Neverwinter Nights, xoreos now also correctly smoothes the vertex normals of (binary) models, so that the metallic effect is not broken by sharp polygon edges.

Changes in xoreos version 0.0.2

This is the first official release of xoreos, together with xoreos-tools.

In this first release, all targeted games work insofar as that they at least show basic in-game areas. I.e. you can start the game, xoreos loads the game resources, loads a campaign or module, and then shows an area of the game.

Within the area, you can fly around in a "spectator" mode, using the common first-person WASD control scheme. Moving the mouse while holding down the middle mouse button rotates the camera. With Ctrl+D, a debug console drops down, allowing for general resource dumping and the loading of different areas, modules and/or campaigns.

A few games, specifically Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, also show a main menu, although the latter's is not as extensive yet. The former also shows a few in-game menu elements.

Additionally, Neverwinter Nights also has a script system hooked up, and preliminary dialogue support. This means that clicking on an NPC opens up its conversation dialog, and some of the script commands will be executed. For example, the door in the first area of the original campaign's prelude opens after speaking to Bim and telling him that no tutorial is necessary. However, triggering the tutorial leads to the scripts looping endlessly, because the necessary game functions are not implemented yet.

Further gameplay is still missing. At the moment, none of the other games have a script system.

The current graphics are very basic: only flat-shaded, textured meshes are shown. No lighting, shadows or shaders of any kind are currently available.