The Nebula Device

Last month Floh sent us some new Nebula3 code from Radon Labs, the new stuff has now been merged into the August2008Merge branch in the public Nebula3 repository. Here’s a list of the major changes:

The Zombie Engine was released yesterday, it’s an open source engine, game framework and level editing tools for Windows action based games. It was developed by Tragnarion Studios and is based on Nebula 2.

While the previous release of the Nebula dependency packages didn’t have any show stopping issues, not all the libraries were using the same runtime as Nebula, this caused VC to complain.

So, aside from the afforementioned runtime normalization, here’s what’s different about the new packages:

• SQLite has been updated to version 3.3.14 (the latest release at this time).
• Theora is now built without MMX support, the MMX code produced a whole bunch of warnings I didn’t feel like fixing.

You can download the new packages from Sourceforge.

Any comments should go here.

In the previous release of the Mangalore dependency packages, CEUI didn’t build out of the box, and the VC7.1 package didn’t include OPCODE. That was rather lame, so I spent the last few days rebuilding the Mangalore dependency packages, most of the time was in fact spent trying to build CEGUI as a static lib (here’s a tip, don’t!).

Here’s what’s different about the new packages:

• ODE has been updated to version 0.8 (the latest release at this time).
• OPCODE is now built into the ODE lib, Mangalore makes use of both anyway so there’s no point doing extra work to keep them separated.
• CEGUI has been updated to version 0.5.0b (the latest release at this time).
• CEGUI is now included in DLL form, building it as a static lib required way too much hackery.
• Now that CEGUI is in DLL form we no longer have to include its dependencies, so tinyxml, freetype and pcre are no longer included in the package.

I also made some changes in SVN to accomodate the new dependency packages, so be sure to update your checkout if you download the new packages.

There are no new Nebula dependency packages as yet, the existing ones work ok, so it’s not a high priority at the moment. But I would like to get all those libs using the same VC runtime library, so I’ll get around to it at some point.

You can download the new packages from Sourceforge.

Any comments should go here.

I just spent some time building mangalore and mviewer using Visual C++ 2005 Express, it was relatively painless. The only issue I really ran into is that one of the CEGUI headers that come in the dependencies package needs to be edited before things will build. So, what you need to do after extracting the dependencies package into your checkout is open

code/mangalore/cegui/falagard/CEGUIFalPropertyDefinition.h

and change line 31 from:

#include "cegui/CEGUIFalPropertyDefinitionBase.h"

to:

#include "cegui/falagard/CEGUIFalPropertyDefinitionBase.h"

And that should get you on your way.

I will fix the dependencies package soon, but first I need to figure out if we should continue to include our own copy of the slightly hacked CEGUI SDK in the package or simply let people grab the SDK from the CEGUI site.

After I got Nebula 2 building on Ubuntu Edgy, I figured I’d update the documentation just in case I have to do everything from scratch again. That’s when I realised the Getting Started documentation is way out of date (and not just the Linux section). So I’ve now updated it to reflect current procedures on all “supported” platforms. Further updates are likely to follow in the near future as I attempt to build Mangalore on Windows and Ubuntu Edgy.

I spent a bit of time getting the core Nebula 2 libraries and tools building on Unbutu Edgy recently, I finally got it going with the help of some contributed patches. So, right now those libraries and tools should build out of the box, however you don’t get any audio (won’t be too hard to fix if you need it), SSE optimizations, or graphics (I haven’t tried building the
contributed OpenGL server). Patches to address these shortcommings will be welcome

Expect more updates to follow in the near future as I attempt to build Mangalore on Ubuntu, if anyone has already done so and has some advice or patches, do let me know.

It’s right here. You’ll also notice there is now a link to it on the sidebar to the right, under the links section.

Check this page out for some videos and information on Drakensang. The videos are mainly people talking in German and concept art but there is some ‘in-nebula’ footage of environments and characters. Also there is the E3 video for those that haven’t seen it.