Saturday, January 12, 2008

150,000 Downloads

"Oh my Strogg, their going after the data brain" well maybe not but some time over the last few days, OpenSebJ has reached another little milestone in it's history - the 150,000 download mark.

So what's been happening, well away in a lovely tree filled mountain, the development team have been hard at work playing to much ET:QW (Enemy Territory Quake Wars) but on the OpenSebJ development front there are the sounds of movement, sort of rustling, like little twigs breaking underfoot. These twigs are momentous in their meaning though as some of the tough work has been going on in the back ground.

OpenSebJ and previously Beat It have had a long time using interfaces to Microsoft's DirectX, through various interfaces, more recently using an interface called MDX. That added a weighty requirement to the distribution, sometimes in excess of 250 meg and although this was never distributed with OpenSebJ people still needed to download and install it as all good pre-requisites do.

Well those requirements are being shaken off and washed away, don't be mistaken - I haven't forsaken Windows support and I'm not going Mackintosh but I have had a revelation and I am going Open Source. Currently the SVN repository has been split in to 3 branches, a SDL.Net branch, OpenAL.Net and the MDX branch for prosperity (wont have further development). After completing a test migration to SDL.Net, I probably wont be continuing this branch any further. It is functional and does what it does but the lack of direct access to the sound buffers and some of the final control means that a lot of original functionality from OpenSebJ would have to be shelved.

So for the time being (until the foreseeable future that is) welcome OpenAL.Net to the OpenSebJ distribution and expect a release shortly.

~OpenSebJ