d-log

Today the OpenSuSE project unleashes its latest offspring to the world. OpenSuSE 11.3 is finally officially available.

During my last installation, 11.2 at the time, more than a month after the release, I bumped into some serious errors (older AMD graphics cards had issues in a vanilla 11.2 install, the so-called black screen error – here and here) I decided I wouldn’t be a beta tester this time and give it some time.

It all looks nice and shiny, and one can see immediately that the linux world is growing up. Many distributions are making deals with companies to bundle various services.

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Torque Powered

Garagegames has not been resting on their laurels after the release of Torque 3D 1.0, their long-anticipated new engine. Just a few weeks after that massive release, they’re back. With a vengeance.

The announcement that all sales of TGE and TGEA would be stopped on november 1st naturally has started heated discussions in the community. People especially were complaining that TGEA was just now becoming with 1.8.1 what it should have been at the 1.0 release.

The forum contained a thread with known fixes for problems in TGEA 1.8.1, and community members were afraid that there would be no more release. That it was end of the line for TGEA at version 1.8.1. Today, Alex Scarborough as done some back-porting of features from T3D into TGEA, and along with a massive amount of bugfixes, released TGEA 1.8.2.

Bugs have also been exterminated at a frightening pace in T3D lately, leading up to the release of Torque3D 1.0.1.
Good news at the beginning of the cold and wet seasons for all those planning some “Torque Work” at home.

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A new major release of WordPress, now at version 2.7, has been released. The visitors of your site won’t see much difference (maybe the slight speed improvement while building the pages), but the people using the administrator interface will certainly notice that nothing has remained the same.
Not only has the admin interface changed from a horizontal list of links under the header to some sort of menu on the left-hand of the interface, you also have a better overview of what is going on. The developers (and especially the theme developers) really outdid themselves here in putting as much on the screen while still keeping it readable and reasonably clean.

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I mentioned in a previous blog that I was considering starting up a website geared at game artists and game developers. After some deliberation over the name with a few friends, 3mension was chosen. In this era of everything having to be faster, sms-languages and turbospeak, I liked the combination of ’3d’ and ‘dimension’.

Well, the name is chosen, the site is registered, and I even managed to get some kind of mailing list setup … euhm … well, set up. There isn’t much yet, but the first steps are already working on my local pc. The ultimate goal is to have a nice little present to ease your hangovers on the second day of the year. But that depends on quite some things that I don’t control entirely (like free time, and the number of bugs I managed to squeeze into my php code).

At the moment, I’m still focusing on having a group of applications available on the web server that will allow me to open up a beta release. Before you mention it : no, I’m not Google. Even if it’s just very posh to release your web software as ‘beta’ nowadays, I believe in the process to root bugs out and to get invaluable feedback from different types of users.

Those interested in getting all the 3mension announcements as soon as they are published, please sign up on the website : www.3mension.com.

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The temporary difdts.nebulagame.com file contains a new model file by Infinitum3d that we’re proud to host. This time, it’s Ambient.

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The Xoops foundation announced on October 22nd that the stable release version of Xoops 2.3 had been made available for download.

Even though this blog is running on WordPress, the Linux philosophy dictates that you need the right tool for the job. Blogging is done using WordPress, and site building is done, in my case, using the excellent Xoops. After some period of internal turmoil at the end of 2007, development seems to have picked up again, with some founding members returning to the community.

It shows. Instead of just updating the looks on some modules, the changelog is listing a lot of impressive and useful additions to the core system, both visible to end-users and some invisible ones that are there to ease module development. I’ve been trying to get the hang of module development for some weeks now (to get this DIF and DTS art site going), and I can see the additions and improvements will make my life easier, and shorten my development cycle considerably.

My verdict: Xoops is back. Development is going forward at a brisk pace, and the community seems to have stabilised. Now all that is needed are some more finished and well-maintained modules, and this will be again a system to be reckoned with.

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