News

The Worldforge Blender Addon has been seen a large update, adding some cool features and fixing some long standing issues. In this post I’ll describe what’s changed. But first, What is the Worldforge Blender Addon? Blender is the designated tool used by the Worldforge project to create 3d assets (“meshes”). It’s a fully featured, professional and totally free 3d creation tool. Since all of our assets are provided as Free Software it’s important that the source material is in a format which allows anyone to access it.

The Open Build Service is a pretty awesome service which allow for (fairly) easy setup of automatic builds of packages on most major Linux distributions. We’re currently using it to automate builds of all Worldforge components on OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Our own little space can be found here. Check out the current status of the builds here. Apart from creating RPM and DEB packages there’s also support for AppImage, which is an executable format for Linux.

There’s been a couple of changes to Ember lately. I’ll try to summarize them here * The biggest one is that we now use OpenGL 3 and later. Previously we used OpenGL 2. The main reason is that OpenGL 3 has a couple of features that we really benefit from, especially when it comes to instancing techniques. Support for this version should also be solid, with all modern GPUs providing compatible drivers.

Worldforge has for quite some time used IRC for official chat. However, since a couple of years the usefulness have been steadily declined. One of the main disadvantages or the IRC system is that there’s no easy way to keep offline conversations going. If you’re not logged in you will simply miss out on questions asked and answers given. Given the global nature of the Worldforge project, with users in different time zones, this makes most conversations fruitless.

Atlas-C++ version 0.6.4 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site. Atlas-C++ is the standard implementation of the WorldForge Atlas protocol. This release is primarily aimed at developers and users who want to build the WorldForge system for themselves. Major changes in this version: Removal of deprecated C++ “throws” feature which broke build on GCC 7 Addition of a debug output Atlas bridge Source code can be downloaded from the following locations: