Today we'd like to announce that 3.8 is now out in the wild! It's been pretty fast paced all in all, with us burning through it in just over 3 months. As mentioned before, this release was largely focused on trying to shore up on the stability front. While it's obviously impossible to ensure any software is 100% stable on every machine, we've noted a definite improvement with the work that went into 3.8.
We managed to pull in well over 70 PRs, some of them being fairly hefty. SDL got a lot of TLC to get it shored up for when we switch over to that as the main of our platform layer down the line, and Linux got a good bit of additional attention to get it in a much more solid state. Of course, there's always more work to do, but a lot of headway was made.
I'd like to put a shout out to the people that PR'd changes that helped us get here:
- Az
- blackwc
- Duion
- buckmaster
- raistlin
- Mango
- rlranft
- John3
- MusicMonkey
- JeffH
- Lopuska
- pacomont
- Timmy
- signmotion
- and the guys at both Winterleaf and BeamNG
So, where can I get this lovely release?
A fine question that a smarter man would have addressed sooner!
You can get the release with binaries for either Windows or Linux from our downloads page on the wiki, here.
Remaining issues
One remaining issue that I tried to get wrapped up, but was unable to because, well, I suck at Linux'ing, was the issue of file dialogs. It was something we'd missed with 3.7, and so for 3.8 I tried to find some cross-platform library we could utilize to get us native file dialogs for linux, and eventually OSX.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get Codeblocks to let me actually debug things, so there's a few niggling issuse causing a crash somewhere with my implementation. I've got a branch concerning it here and if anyone can either tell me how to get codeblocks to properly debug, or can figure out the crash themselves, I can PR it right away and get a hotfix out to re-enable file dialogs for the Linux build.
Alright, so what's next?
Now, we take some time and properly draft the minutia of what we're planning for 3.9. That said, we've already got a pretty solid idea of the major hits we're shooting to implement.
Here are the major features we're looking to get in for 3.9:
- New Project Manager that works on all the platforms that T3D does, and uses CMake as it's generation back-end, but a sleeker, easier to use front-end.
- Deferred Shading
- Initial integration of the Entity/Component stuff, alongside existing game classes
- Taml/Asset/Module systems
- Beginning of Shadergen 3.0
- Shadow Caching
- Initial DX11 implementation
- Hardware Skinning
- Numerous tool improvements
- More work to make SDL the primary platform system.
- OSX Support
Indeed it is. Of course, quite a lot of it is a good ways along already, and some stuff is just waiting to be PR'd or is ALREADY PR'd and just needs to be merged in.
That said, we are looking at 3.9 taking a bit longer than the rather quick 2 month timeline we'd set for 3.8(+1 month testing the RC). Nothing absurd like "See all of you in a year!", but it taking more like 5 or 6 months wouldn't be mindblowing.
Of course, if we can get it done faster, I don't think anyone will complain
As always, if you note any issues, please make an issue on the github page, and if you have anything you'd like to contribute or suggestions of things you'd like to see, by all means hit us up on the forums, we'd love to hear feedback!
And here are the release notes.
Have a good one, and happy developing!
