NTA has implemented a first pass of getting audio support into the engine — this is using OpenAL, it works in Windows and Linux and we will be developing it further in the coming months.

Blender is a free and very useable 3D modelling program. We now have a fully featured export plugin for Blender, that exports meshes, collision files, classes, and maps into Grit. This makes it much easier to develop content for the engine.

Jost has been working on a new car — the Scarman. A slow luxury Sedan.

We also now have explosions, exploding cars, fire that spreads, etc. Cars explode when they are damaged or turn upside down, appear burnt out and can’t be driven.

Razzeeyy has been working on the plane logic, making it easier to fly and adding features.

Last and not least, the Grit project’s founder and lead developer got married!

In conclusion, Grit is still marching forwards, expect much more over the coming months.

Here is a summary of some of the more visible work people have been doing the last few months:

• Complete reimplementation of the background streaming subsystem
• Background loading of textual collision mesh files
• Binary collision mesh files
• Texture streaming is now automatic — you don’t have to specify the list of used textures in your class definition
• Communal work on ‘project’ map has started, a tiling city block that we can instantiate multiple times to make a large city, and Brian has started a new ‘urban’ map
• Camera now tracks vehicles automatically
• Added a low power mode for laptop debugging (mostly for development, this is an idea I stole from portal)
• Overlays — useful for road markings, z offset scaled by vertical distance from camera
• Work in progress for bloom
• Mesh material remapping from class objects
• Added a nice exploding oil drum, and a traffic control orange barrel for roadworks
• Added the sponza map, very high poly! include “sponza/init.lua”
• PCF shadow filter can now use a noise map instead of just the simple dither pattern (enabled by default)

In addition to this, we have moved the website, forums, and wiki, to another host.

So, even if we aren’t posting, we are keeping busy

More news on new features will appear soon.

After a large amount of effort restructuring the engine into a deferred shading pipeline, it has finally been possible to implement point lights and spotlights through a deferred lighting pass. There is a reasonable performance hit with the switch to deferred shading, but individual lights are now quite cheap, so we should be able to build some pretty nice looking scenes.

Documentation for the new lights can be found at on the wiki.

The next step is to implement coronas so we can get a nice effect at the actual light location. There remains a lot more to do beyond that as well. We plan to implement a smooth fade out instead of the abrupt removal of the light, support for blinking / flickering lights (i.e. damaged neon tubes), support for turning off the lights during the day (with a bit of noise in the timings) and turning on/off the car lights when the car is not being driven. Car brake lights should also be possible soon. Finally, there should be some way of rendering emissive textures so we can render the actual ‘bulb’ of the light.

There are two new tutorials up around the site and there has been a lot of new information added to the game engine wiki. Some improvements have been made to the pipeline for artists, so even if you’ve used the tools already, you’ll want to at least skim through the asset export tutorial.

The first game engine tutorial to share here today is the script installation tutorial itself. If you’ve already installed the scripts, take a peek at the bottom of the page and catch a savory tip for automatically updating the scripts when new versions roll out. In the future there will be more formal installation routines when scripts are updated less often, but the tip at the game engine wiki will make this as painless as it gets.

The second tutorial is the max to game engine export tutorial. After you’ve installed the scripts, you need to put some models in the game engine, right?  This is as quick and dirty as it gets. Go through the steps, see the model in the game. The game engine export tutorial like anything else could use some improvement, please make suggestions and don’t hesitate to ask if there is something unclear. That’s why we’re here.

Summary of changes:

Materials are now given by string (none of that hex number rubbish anymore) and users can easily add their own materials (see common/phys_mats.lua for examples).  The materials don’t do much yet but they will get fleshed out with various gameplay and behavioural features as time goes by.

The physical materials are now very similar to the graphical materials, they exist (by default) in the directory of the lua file in which they are defined. Tcol files will look in their local directory for physical materials just like mesh files look in their local directory for graphical materials.

Note: When using the tcol maxscript, don’t try and use the GRIT_PHYSMAT material anymore, just assign a normal material with the name you want.

The new system should be a lot more powerful and user-friendly than the old system so any hassle bringing existing tcol files up to date should be worth it.  Thanks!

This screen-shot was digitally enhanced during the down-scaling process. lol.

At this time of writing, I’m feeling like the web page is a little too orange, while the forum just needs some default icons replaced to be brilliant.

Aside from this, there are a couple of forum topics I’d like to point you to. The first is a place to discuss the recent changes to the website and forum and the second is a topic related directly to Grit development: Help us decide the base location of the community game world.

There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes, although we’re not quite ready to spill any beans about the latest advancements to the Grit Game Engine. Join the forum to tell us what you think so far.

UPDATE: You can now select a color preference

You can check this quick guide to SVN in the forums about setting up SVN to use with Grit. It is intuitive and useful and ensures that everyone can stay up to date at a time where the engine changes so much that releases are a wasteful duty.

There will still be zip releases, but as those are quite slow to do (Changing OS to compile) it will only happen when there is a good bunch of new features to brag about from the SVN.

We have changed to PHPbb simply as a wider used, seemingly more easily-administered forum once things are set up. Most people will probably be happy to hear that, and while I’m sorry we lost our first bits in the forum, I am definitely glad it happened before it was more populated with content. If we were much bigger it would have been really upsetting, I’m sure.

We will have the forums in order for posting again soon, in the mean time you can grab your new account and watch the Grit RSS for a short announcement that says the preliminary topic and category structure is ready and open.

The newest pre-alpha snapshot will be back on the forums within 24 hours.

UPDATE: Another new release in the quoted link below. Keep an eye to that topic for all new releases to get to know grit . We’ll have them there until we make an official release.

Spark started a topic where he released an alpha build of the game engine over on the game engine forum. You can now grab a copy for yourself and start learning how things will be done in Grit and get acquainted with all the rendering effects and interactive objects already available.

Keep in mind that Grit is early alpha and open source, so the use of the forum, svn, and wiki will likely be key to your success in the use and development of Grit. That being said, don’t hesitate to ask for help with anything, no matter how small.

Alternatively, you can register and participate at the new game engine forum.

There are a couple of videos and you can build the Grit Game Engine on your own, however, no binaries are yet being publicly served. Get involved for access to the latest builds.