Ember 0.3.1 released

2005/06/16 Ember 0.3.1 released by: erik

Ember version 0.3.1 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site.

Ember is a fully functional 3d client for the WorldForge project. It takes advantage of the latest graphic cards to present a beautiful, fully interactive world. An easy to use GUI allows the player to interact with both the world and other players with ease.

This release adds support for areas, such as fields or paths. These areas are dynamically created from entities in the world. Also added support for showing objects wielded by characters. Additionally, a lot of bugfixes and graphical tweaks went into this version.

Changes in this version

Added support for areas, such as fields or paths.
Optimized the terrain rendering code and the terrain materials a bit.
Implemented placement modes, allowing for swimming and floating.
Added ability to show wielded objects in the hands of the characters.

A larger summary of changes can be found here.

This version can be downloaded from the sourceforge download site, at the following locations:

ember-0.3.1.x86.package (for all linux distributions, just execute in a shell)
ember-0.3.1.tar.gz

A note on performance:

Although there has been some work put into this release trying to optimize the performance it is just not something that is high on our priority right now. Our current goals are to add features and expand the capabilities of the client.
The minimum requirements are a Geforce 2 or similiar card with at least 256 Mb system memory. If you experience bad performance, there are some things you can do to improve it.

Make sure you use the best drivers. For NVidia and ATI these are the propriety ones. Run glxinfo in a console and make sure you're not accidentally using the Mesa libraries.
Edit ~/.ember/ember.conf and make sure "foliage" and "fresnelwater" are turned off. The first option eats a lot of memory while the second one taxes the GPU
Edit ~/ember/ogre.cfg and decrease the resolution. Note that this will mess a little with the gui layout.

More information can be found at the Ember site.