You may have seen that a lot of recent commits in the SVN were related to iOS target. We're adding a new renderer, based from the start on Vertex Arrays, multitexturing is now supported, as trilinear filtering, network, and so on ...

Here's a quickly made small video that shows all this:


720p HD version is available on youtube, perfect for fullscreen

All this is running smoothly, up to 60 FPS at 960x640 for KingHill2. Quite impressive to see, trust me !

Ouille and I are now working on a new data structure for mesh files that will improve loading time on one hand, and that will provide a huge performance boost for the new renderer on the other hand. (ManiaDrive will probably jump to 60 FPS on the iPhone, too, for instance).

Long story short, this is still a work in progress, but the iPhone target for Raydium is now close to what we can call "functional", now !

This video was created for the Raydium conference at the RMLL / LSM 2009, in Nantes. It shows a few applications, games, test, experimentations done with the engine.

Thanks to all people that were here !



Direct link to the video: http://ftp.cqfd-corp.org/conf_raydium_full_sound.avi (200 MB, 640x480, MPEG4)
Warning: the quality is low (a few medias comes from youtube), as the compression (none for the audio track, for instance), so the file is huge. Download only if you're a fan. A big fan.

PS: I've seen that a few people were taking photos. If one of them comes across this message: Can you please send us your files ? It's cool for illustrating news

You may have heard of RMLL, also known as LSM (Libre Software Meeting), an annual event on free software taking place in july in France since 2000. The LSM meeting is organized this year in Nantes from 7th to 11th july, and I will be speaking of Raydium, during a small meeting, Friday 10. Meet you "salle E102", at Ireste (Polytech), at 5:10pm !

En français vite fait : 17h10 vendredi prochain, 10 juillet

The conference: http://2009.rmll.info/The-3D-game-engin ... ml?lang=en
More about LSM/RMLL: http://2009.rmll.info/?lang=en
Booking: https://reservation.rmll.info/account/login/

If you're a Raydium SVN user, you may have noticed that a few things are upside down since a few hours ... The reason is simple: Raydium now handle correctly TGA file format, including RLE compression and "flipping bits" (revision 799, thanks to ouille). Since its beginning, Raydium was reading TGA as if the "y flip" bit was set, whatever it was or not. But as a lot of files in the repository were created without this bit set, Raydium now reads these files upside down. And everything is broken.


Don't panic. Oh no, wait, do !

We've changed almost all textures in the official R3S repository so the y-flip bit is set. Everything should then looks OK again, all you have to do is refresh you own files, using one these two methods:

1 - Use the "--repository-refresh" command line tags with all applications. It will force the application to download modified files from the repository. But remember to fully use all functionalities: for instance, with test6, you must run the demo, fire a rocket, fire a bullet, add a crate (space key), ... It's the only way to be sure that all textures will be used.

2 - Use our magic texture pack : http://ftp.cqfd-corp.org/raydium_repo_f ... xtures.tgz
In this archive, you'll find all textures available (and fixed) in the repository. Just refresh your own data files with all this, and everything will be OK.

You may have to fix your own textures, too, so be vigilant when launching your applications using this new Raydium release, to be sure to detect all flipped textures (if any). You can use any Gimp-like application to reverse your TGA files. We may also provide a small tool to help you doing this on a big amount of files, just ask for it in the comments.

We'll also ask you, please, to report any trouble with "official" textures from the repository, we may have missed something.

We apologize for all this, and be sure we do our best to avoid compatibility breaks, but TGA reading abilities of Raydium were too limited to cover all needs, so this rewrite was mandatory.

Sorry, again, for any inconveniences caused, and have fun with this new TGA reader ! (tip: Blender and Raydium are now friends about TGA)

Last days, we've seen Raydium Windows SDK and Raydium Mac OSX SDK updated, thanks to ouille and st, respective maintainers of these projects. You can find all this on the download page, right now.

And I just remember that Linux users will find the nightly SVN snapshot, as usual, with a lovely, nice, shiny, glossy, up-to-date and complete release of Raydium.

Subsidiary question: guess what's my favorite OS ?

If you're a serious reader of Raydium's forum or our SVN feed, you've probably seen the amazing work-in-progress of st, our Mac guy.

And he did it !

MacOS X is now an official target for Raydium ! This was requested by many developers and users since years. So you can now expect to see Raydium games for MacOS X, starting with the upcoming st's port of ManiaDrive. Of course, all our next games will also support natively this target at release time, including ManiaDrive 2 (aka ManiaCrash) !

You can find the SDK in the download section. (direct link)

You can have a look to the forum thead about this new Raydium port, and report your experience with this brand new SDK.

Release notes for this SDK:

Requirements:
- Xcode 2.4 or higher.

Includes:
- Latest Raydium Subversion revision R709.
- Universal binary dependencies for all kinds of i386 and PPC architecture subtypes.
- Xcode 2.4 compatible project files.
- iCompile script to easily build and test applications using a terminal.
- Application template including the Leopard ready IconsFileStore Raydium logo.

Instructions:
1. Download the Raydium SDK for Mac OS X.
2. When the auto-mount option was disabled, double-click the disk image to mount it.
3. Drag & drop the Raydium folder wherever you like to install the SDK (e. g. /Library/Raydium or ~/Library/Raydium).
4. Start up Xcode and load the Raydium.xcodeproj or open a terminal and use the iCompile script to build the samples.

No news here since 2 years !



We were so busy working on Raydium and on applications that the website was a bit ... abandoned, in facts. I'll make my best to make sure it will never happen again.

What was done in two years ? A lot, really. Let's try to sum up things. Sure, we made hundreds of various bugfixs and cleanups (more than 200 commits), but we've bigger news for you, such as new full, up-to-date, and maintained Win32 SDK. This SDK is built around Code::Blocks, but can also be used without this IDE, with provided command lines tools.




On the other hand, we also made a big license switch. The whole project moved from GPLv2 to a dual-license: LGPL and BSD. This allows everyone to use Raydium like they want, without conflicting with their own license(s), commercial or not, and allow us to keep rights on our code.

A lot of work has also been done on the engine's documentation, now completed (HDR, MyGLUT, PHP scripting, web server, media path, ...) and fully up-to-date.

But also an amazing number of other things, like:

- new camera features, such as multiple viewports (see test8.c demo), mouse ("freemove") camera, orbit camera, ...
- improved Linux configuration scripts
- new RayODE features, as gravity control, motors monitoring, rays full support, motored universal joints, mouse picking, custom physic frequency and timestep, hinge2 limits, new element-point-to-world-point (and vectors) helpers, onboard camera on static elements, ...
- improved and updated Blender import/export scripts
- easy support for internationalization
- added a FPS limiter (useful to limit CPU usage of an application)
- updated TRI mesh file format to support up to 4 textures per vertex (useful for shaders)
- updated shader support, with automatic tangent vector computation (and smoothing) in shaders, so TBN matrix is now super easy to build (see bumpmapped parallax mapping demo in shader_test.c). It's also now possible to access shader parameters from PHP scripts.
- added support for anisotropic filtering, texture compression and texture freeing
- up-to-date binding generator for Python and Java !
- joysticks/pads/wheels support for win32
- LiveAPI support for win32 (webcams and other VFW sources)
- made an official switch to ODE 0.7 (and any recent release of ODE is compatible, too)
- updated video playback API, now featuring synchronized audio (OGG) and playback speed control
- updated media path feature
- added "init_load" feature, allowing to fully setup an application from an external text file (lights, fog, skybox, ...)
- added replay support ! With slow-motion, rewind, recursive-recording, ...
- added Raydium contribs, as a collada importer, a completion symbols generator for the Geany text editor, but also Raydium contrib applications like a kart game, ragdoll demos, wiimote demo, shaders demo, ...
- added an experimental sprite engine
- updated camera path recorder, and added a camera path player
- ...




We're now pretty close to release a new stable version of Raydium: 0.800. The last stable release was the 0.680, from 2005...

Stay tuned !

A new "running demo" is now available for Raydium: Volcano. This demo features a water shader example, and a lot of particle effects.



A video is available and the source code is available in SVN.

Since a few weeks now, Raydium provides a support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language), allowing Toon style rendering, Normal Maps, Water effect and so on. The doc is not ready yet, but a demo application is available in current sources and SDK, and a water demo will come (very) soon.





A video is available for water effect :

click here: https://raydium.org/captures/rayShaderWater.avi

Also, new effects are about to be added to the engine, including environment maps (reflections) and ... HDR post processing !







More to come !

ManiaDrive 1.01 is ready and announced !





For its first public release, ManiaDrive hits the floor ! In less than 24 hours, this release generates more than 50 GB of uploaded data, 1 200 downloads, 150 000 hits on Raydium and ManiaDrive websites, almost 200 online players, ...

This is what we can call a success for this second big Raydium game. Let's see how things will move, now !

Refs:
ManiaDrive website: http://maniadrive.raydium.org/
OpenGL.org: http://www.opengl.org/news/permalink/ma ... ic_tracks/
LinuxFr: http://linuxfr.org/2006/05/13/20804.html