Newsmaster wanted

[greenman]

During the last months the news on our webpage have not been updated really often. thats why i think we need someone to take care about them.

any volunteers ?

[beni]

I would do it, but I'm not really inside of Orxonox anymore, so I myself don't know the news.
Can't just everyone add stuff to the sites as he goes? Since we're all allowed to change the site, everybody can update the news if there is something new.

[greenman]

that's right, but nobody does ^^
that's why i thought maybe if someone was responsible for it there would be more news...

[x3n]

for some reason i think beni is the right man for this job

not being "really inside of orxonox" is absolutely no problem. all professional developers have a PR-manager which does nothing else than writing news, answering questions and maintaining the forums. what he says will be quoted on fanpages and in gaming magazines, though he has not even coded a single line or built a simple model. he's usually involved in the development meetings to get the latest news and present the community feedback, but he's not making the game. thus many press releases often contain wrong or outdated information or miss certain details. but no one cares, because that's just how it is... i rather have some 90% correct news about orxonox than zero 100% correct news.

[greenman]

he has my vote

[beni]

I can do some of the news of course, but I'm against my job description ^^. My involvement in Orxonox is more than what x3n described

[x3n]

I can do some of the news of course, but I'm against my job description ^^. My involvement in Orxonox is more than what x3n described

Of course, it never was my intention to describe you like that. I was just saying you con't have to be a fulltime developer to write news.

You're job description is "japanese translator" of course.

[greenman]

ok, deal settled

[beni]

alright, what's new?

News could be releases (nothing new there I guess), stuff about PPS (maybe announce the new PPS for the new semester?), changes on the homepage or similar things...

[greenman]

-0.0.4 was recently tagged

-review of pps hs09 and presentation ^^

-maybe also the announcement of pps fs10

-rumors about a coming 0.1 release ^^

[x3n]

yeah, 1) summary of the last semester + presentation 2) new improvements in the network engine (ask oli for some impressive numbers), 3) 0.0.4

and we'll get a blitz article btw

[greenman]

@blitz: cool, written by whom ?

@network improvements (can also be found in irc channel log):
trunk vs network2 (empty_level (presentation_dm almost the same), 50 bots)
data per network tick:

• trunk: ~76KB
• network2: ~4.6KB

time consumption for data diffing and compression:

• trunk: ~25ms
• network2: ~5.5ms

additional feature: better possibility to multithread these operations

btw: right now I'm trying to optimise some things in the object hierarchy to further reduce this traffic

[x3n]

@blitz: cool, written by whom ?

you. have fun

no, by me

[beni]

Okay, that sounds very nice. Cool stuff.

I've got some questions about those things:

1) Is there anything special about 0.0.4 (some additional information) or is it just a running newest version of the features from last semester?

2) When is the Blitz article going to be released? Week or issue number?

3) With the review of last semester some more screen shots would be very nice. (I may be able to try to make them myself, but I'm not sure if I'll find all the features and cool levels)

4) Are there already ideas for projects for next semester or should I just refer to the PPS site for later?

[1337]

Merged presentation2 branch back to trunk.
Major new features:
- Actual GUI with settings, etc.
- Improved space ship steering (human interaction)
- Rocket fire and more particle effects
- Advanced sound framework

That means:
- Our GUI is now nested and can configure part of Orxonox like sound volume, graphics settings, etc.
- SpaceShip steering is much more user friendly (more useful features like damage indicators and shooting at the mouse pointer location)
- The space ship can fire rockets that are steered by the controller.
- Kevin Young has made music and significantly improved the sound framework towards something useful. Ambient music is now XML loadable and he implemented cross fading as well. 3D sounds are also XML loadable, however they are mostly bound to an event. And we're still having trouble with an easy connection of event <--> sound.

From the data branch:
- New models for the allied fleet