Hiya, and welcome to the first development blog update for project moondance!
This will be the first of our monthly progression posts enlightening our user-base on some of the things the team have been doing over the month in regards to development and fixing/modernizing the game.
Firstly, we have chosen to develop from the 5_1-new branch. Why? Well, pretty simple one to answer! The newfield changes removed a lot of support and compatibility and this prevented us from continuing from our 5.0.x project. Secondly, I had a hard time comprehending some of the decisions made in why the changes were made in the first place. So for ease of continuation and simplicity, we chose that branch.
Although it will be internally known as version 5.3, we've decided to give this particular version a prominent codename as well: "OutFox". To outfox is to be clever and cunning, a skill that will be very useful while working on this code!
We are active in several branches on our development repo, as this allows everyone to work on something to their talents, and also keeps things fresh in the team as we can always sit and have a chat on different topics.
This Month's Progress
You can always follow our work on the "Taiga tracker":https://tracker.projectmoon.dance/, and if you feel like you can offer anything to the project, please feel free to contact us!
Libjpeg and libPNG removal: Replaced with STB_Image
It has been a bane of RageTexture in regards to texture support due to the age of the libraries and the methodology in how it loads and supports textures in game. We have noticed that the versions of these libraries are from circa 2005, and are almost as archaic as Rage itself. We have changed the texture support to stb-image which removes library dependency altogether, and removes a lot of the paletted texture problems which are causing problems on modern day hardware. The use of paletted textures has been deprecated since 2004, and it is about time we remove this code from the engine.
Update GLEW to 2.1.0
In preparation to remove GLEW completely in favor of a new methodology, we chose to modernize the version first to see if there was any benefits or improvements in it's technique for loading function pointers. It gave a marginal gain, but was disappointing overall. It will be removed in a future build.
Themes
A modified version of the Lambda default theme introduced on 5.1 is included in these builds, with OutFox branding, a new blue and gold/orange colour scheme, and other internal performance improvements.