OpenDUNE 0.5 Released

[MrFlibble]

OpenDUNE v0.5 has been released yesterday. This is what the dev team member TrueBrain has to say on this:

Today we are proud to announce the release of OpenDUNE 0.5

This is the fourth release in a set of releases which concentrate in understanding and rewriting all functions of the original code, making enhancements on the way, without really changing the game in any way. A complete list of enhancements can be found here.

This release finally has all functions converted to 'real C', and we are now cleaning up stuff. A lot of functions have been named, variables have been identified, and the stability has increased a lot. Many small (and odd) bugs have been fixed and addressed.

A big welcome goes to Alberth, which joined our development team for this release. He is partly the reason we are much further along than I expected to be.

For the next release we will try to remove the libemu dependency, making that release the first 'stand alone' release.

As per usual, a changelog has been made, and can be viewed http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.5/changelog.txt.

Please keep in mind that until we understand more of the game, you still need to manually put the Dune2 data files in the proper directory; if you do not, the game will not start.

You can download the release http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.5/, and here you can discuss the release on our forum.

We strongly recommend that you download an updated scenario.pak (tnx to MrFlibble): http://forum.opendune.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=23

Special thanks:

This release wouldn't have been here if it wasn't for the following people (alphabetic order):

- MrFlibble (for his scenario.pak updates, and his endless questions and suggestions)

- tneo (for, singlehandedly, continuing finding more bugs than the entire team could solve)

The development team (alphabetic order):

Albert Hofkamp (Alberth)

Loic Guilloux (glx)

Patric Stout (TrueBrain)

Steven Noorbergen (Xaroth)

[Xaroth]

Adding to this, development has been insane since our 0.5 release, which leads to this:

Today we reached a huge milestone. We removed our dependency on LibEMU.

LibEMU is the library we wrote which basically emulates DOS and 80386 hardware. It is a rather complex piece of software' date=' that handles things like IO ports, IRQs, timers, PCMs, PICs, Video, keyboard, mouse, ... Everything normally either your hardware does or DOS does. This is required because we wanted OpenDUNE to run on many systems, and so they first need to converge to a single layer, then split back to the OS calls etc.

For the last week we have been working hard to remove all the calls done to LibEMU (and with that the whole 16bit world). Today we reached that milestone, and with proud I can now say we no longer depend on LibEMU.

So, what does this mean for OpenDUNE as project?

First off, we are completely free'd of the 16bit world. This means we have all the static data Dune2.exe had to offer, we have found every variable, every array, every struct there is. And we are completely free to change it how ever we want, no longer restricted by the boundaries set by the 16bit world. This for us is huge, and it means we can finally do what ever we can think of, without having to worry about breaking anything.

Second, it means OpenDUNE has only one dependency: libSDL. Nothing else. This makes compiling (and developing) a lot easier.

Finally, it means we no longer have to deal with another layer to which calls are made. No more emu_ functions, nothing. This also, is huge.

So now we can move forward, naming functions, fixing bugs, improving on Dune. The road is now literally open to everything.

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[Nyerguds]

Wow. No more 16-bit? That's truly an epic milestone :)