Boson 0.13 is now available.
In addition to many internal changes and
improvements, this release includes a new fog of war system supporting "sight
fog" in addition to "exploration fog" that we had earlier. Another noticeable
feature is that distant units are now rendered as icons making them easier
to recognize as well as increasing performance.
A few new screenshots illustrating those features can be found on our
screenshots page.
Longer changelog for the new release can be found
here.
You can download 0.13 here.
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We are happy to announce that Boson 0.12 is
now available.
Highlights of this release include support for shadows, completely new
radar system and addition of power and ammunition resources. Longer list of
changes can be found here.
Some new screenshots are also available.
You can grab 0.12 from the downloads page.
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Thanks to Lital Natan, we now have a new species. Few early screenshots
have been added to the screenshots page.
Also, many changes to the code have been made, highlights include support for shadows,
new radar system, turrets turning towards their targets, facilities consume power,
and visual feedback for your orders.
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It took a bit too long, but after 1.5 years of hard work, 0.11 is finally out!
This time, in addition to the usual packages, we have an installer with a
precompiled binary which doesn't depend on Qt/KDE. This should be good news
for those who don't have KDE installed. You can find the installer as
well as all the other packages on the
download page.
You can read the official announcement
here as well as
the changelog.
Highlights of this release include a
LibUFO port for user interface,
graphical improvements such as realistic water, new effects and fully
operational multiplayer support.
Some new screenshots are also available.
The release got delayed so much because the
authors have been busy lately and thus didn't
have enough time to work on Boson. We are still short of manpower so please
take a look at our jobs list and help if you
can!
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Over a year is left since the last Boson release and you probably
heard about the LibUFO port.
The work which was done the last months was mainly under the hood
and is comming up now. So far the new LibUFO OpenGL GUI is still in a
development phase but most parts of Boson are ported and some things
are even working ;)
Another feature we guess you will enjoy, is the use of shaders to render water.
Please note that shaders are only supported on modern graphics cards
(GeForce FX+ or Radeon 9500+)
We've uploaded some new screenshots showing
parts of the LibUFO port and of course, water rendering using shaders.
Enjoy !
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Once again, we wish you all happy holidays!
Sorry about the total lack of updates in the last half a year, but we're
not dead, we've been working hard and are moving towards Boson 0.11. We
have had some news in our mailing list though, so if you're interested, you
could
subscribe
there. At this time, we haven't settled a release date for 0.11 yet, but it
will probably not come out in next months.
We have made many improvements in Boson and added many features, including
new LibUFO-based GUI (which is
still in very early development phase).
We've made a whole page of new screenshots
showing some of the most important new features.
If you're interested, you can
take a look at a longer list of improvements since
0.10.
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After a long and very hard work, we bring to you Boson 0.10.
Read the announcement here and then
download it. There are also some
new screenshots and the
changelog for those who are
interested.
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The Boson Team wishes you a merry christmas and a happy new year.
0.9.1 binary packages are now available for Gentoo, Debian and Redhat, you
can get them from the download page.
CVS contains some new features, most interesting of
which is probably support for neutral units. Neutral units will include
stuff such as civilian building and nature (e.g trees).
We also have two new screenshots showing some
neutral units such as trees.
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Boson 0.9.1 is now released.
It fixes some problems discovered in 0.9, including broken network and crash
with NVidia drivers when no usable font was found. We encourage all 0.9
users to upgrade!
Read the announcement here and then
download it!
Note that data and music packages were not changed, so if you already have
0.9, you only need to download code package (and data, if you want to have
"0.9.1" instead of "0.9" on startup page ;-))
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Some screenshots of 0.9 are now available.
We also have new poll about 0.9: what new feature do you like most.
Last poll showed that our users want more frequent releases, we'll try to do
so in the future.
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It took way too long, but now it's finally there!
Read the announcement here, complete
changelog here or jump right to
the download page.
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Some new
screenshots have been made, showing
mostly lighting. They're really beautiful ;-)
Dot finally
mentioned yesterday that we
have movies available. It took a month, but it
looks like it was worth it as yesterday we had about 10 times more visitors
than on an average day.
About release date for 0.9, we still cannot say anything certain yet, but it
looks like it may come at the end of November in December.
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We have a new poll finally: How often should Boson be released?
The previous poll was up more than 6 weeks (for too long, I know) and had
more than 120 votes. Quite expectedly, people want AI most, more than half
of the voters chose AI. Second place went to better graphics.
About AI, unfortunately we won't have any intelligent AI in 0.9 (it will
still have same dummy AI that 0.8 had), but there is already scripting
support and once it has evolved far enough, we'll start developing AI.
We'll use Python as scripting language,
so in case you have any experience with either this or AI and if you're
willing to help us, write to our
mailing
list.
About graphics, if you're an artist, please
contact us!
We need your help! Programmers and testers are welcome too!
On other news, CVS has some new new features again.
Probably most noticeable is improved support for lighting, e.g. terrain is
now lit correctly. Models have support for smooth surfaces. Startup code
(for starting new games and loading saved ones) was rewritten. And we have
experimental LOD (level of detail) support now. It means that models farther
from the camera will be drawn with less detail, resulting in
speedups.
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A while ago we promised a surprise - here it comes:
We present you the Boson movies!
There are two short movies, showing how Boson can look like.
The first movie shows an aircraft bombarding the enemy's base and the second
one shows a big attack of a player against the enemy.
They were made using scripts (yes, scripting engine has already evolved that
far) and CVS boson code.
You can download the movies and find more information about them on the
movies page.
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First, we have a poll now, so you can vote about some stuff :-)
The first poll is about what in your opinion is most important for Boson
right now. Vote and we may take poll's results into account while
developing.
On other news, some of you have probably noticed the protest page against
software patents in Europe. As a part of
bigger campaign
we replaced the main page with it from 27th August until 1st September. It
seems the vote itself has been delayed until the end of September, so
there's still some time for you to
take action. If software patents will
be legalized in europe, we (as well as many other open-source projects) may
not be able to continue our work, because many ideas we use (e.g.
progress bars)
are patented.
About CVS, there is, as always, lots of new stuff there. Most noticeable are
redesigned startup widgets, new wreckage handling (they now slowly sink
into ground instead of disappearing at once) and many fixed bugs. Updated
changelog is available at status page.
And we have a surprise for you coming soon, so check back in a week or so
;-)
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I know, we've had total lack of updates, sorry about that. More than four
months have passed without a single article.
But Boson is still being actively developed and there are number of new and
exciting features in current CVS version.
Here are few of them:
- Units accelerate/decelerate realistically
- New terrain rendering code. Terrain is now drawn using several layers
which are blended together. This creates nice effect for transitions and
looks really nice
- Few updated unit models
- New unit: Koyote (a nice helicopter with a cannon)
- New unit: Warthog (A-10 plane with heavy anti-tank missiles)
- New unit: Wolf (a truck which may carry other units in the future)
- You can now add multiple units and draw multiple tiles in editor using
click+drag
- Ground textures are drawn over multiple cells, making tiling effect less
visible
- Basic scripting support using Python. Old (dumb) AI has already been
converted to a script
More detailed list of changes can be found on the
status page.
The homepage has some new stuff, too. There's new counter and
statistics page in case you're interested.
And last, but not least, there are couple of new
screenshots available!
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After a long time we have finally completed boson 0.8. Read the
announcement here and then download it
from the download page.
New screenshots coming soon...
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It's been quite long since the last update.
Good new is that we're moving towards 0.8 which will probably be released in
late March. Of course there are many
changes in the current CVS version. To name a
few bigger:
- Better support for upgrades, including weapon upgrades
- Support for heightmaps. Map is not flat anymore!
- Better selection code
- New XML-based saving format. Saving/loading is still experimental, but
should work
- Tooltips for units
Also, our screenshots page is updated. No new
screens yet, but the page itself is improved. Individual screenshots are now
also shown inside HTML-page, you can see the comment and date. And
screenshots are on multiple pages, 10 screens each.
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Here comes another status update.
Our last release, 0.7, has been downloaded about 3000 times now. When it was
released, our homepage received as many hits during the following week
as it had since September when the new homepage was opened :-)
Now about CVS. There are already many improvements in our CVS code and we're
moving forward to 0.8. Biggest changes are:
- Map information is preloaded on startup (no slowdown when changing
map)
- Particles drawing has been improved
- Big optimizations
- Smaller map format
- Of course, usual bugfixes
For more, take a look at the done section of our
status page. There are many additions!
Also, two new screenshots, taken from the CVS
version, are available.
And last, but not least, code of this homepage is now licenced under GPL
which means that you can use it to create your own pages, provided that you
also give note about the original author
(The Boson Team) and
a link to this page. And we'd be happy if you'd also mail us, so we know if
somebody is using it ;-)
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Steve provided us with RPM packages
for Mandrake 9.0 (on i386). You can download them at
SourceForge.
Thanks a lot Steve!
These packages already contain the smaller-textures fix announced two months
ago.
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The Boson handbook is now available online. You can have a look at
it here.
This is the cvs version. It will be rebuild every night.
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Many users who downloaded 0.7 reported problems when using 24bpp depth
or when playing in fullscreen mode. We have found out that the reason for this were too
big textures which didn't fit into the memory of the videocard and caused
big slowdowns. A Package containing the fix (scaled-down textures) is available
from the download page.
We're sorry for any inconvenience.
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Krzysztof Kosz once
again provided us with RPM packages. You can find them on our
download page!
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The Boson Team is happy to announce that release 0.7 of Boson is now
available. Read the announcement here
and then download it from the download page.
Also, check out new screenies on the screenshots
page.
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We have now dynamic news!
This means that the main page now has a fixed number (currently 5) of articles and
older articles are in the "Older News" sidebar box. There is also
a page that contains all news articles. Many
thanks to Brad for this feature!
About Boson, version 0.7 will most probaly be released in November, so we
encourage everybody to get a CVS copy of Boson
and test it. If you find any bugs, please report
them so we can fix them before release.
Biggest changes since the last update include a updated unit editor which now
supports editing of all current unit properties including weapons.
A new starting widget for the map editor where you can choose existing maps to edit
or create new a one (and select it's size).
And, as always, many bugs have been fixed and many smaller things have been changed.
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