VERSION 0.7.0

[martiño]

After a really long time of development version 0.7.0 is here. This is a huge step in Glest history, 3D art for unit models and tilesets has been totally reworked, a new website is online, and tons of improvements have been added.

Most important additions are:

- New 3D models for units
- New 3D models and textures for tilesets
- 3D model format changed to add support for player colors
- New sounds
- New maps
- Improvements on building command
- Experience levels
- New command available: morph
- 3D textures (for animated water)
- Water Effects
- Focus arrows
- New XML field: anim-speed
- MPs (Magic Points) are now called EPs (Energy Points)
- New cell sytem: maps 2x bigger, river borders more accurate
- Minimap is now filtered
- Surface detail removed (always draw on max detail)
- Animated trees on intro screen
- Pressing 'T' saves a TGA image on the screen folder
- Improved AI
- Units react instantly when given a command
- Ranged units now attack walking units
- Camera angle changed
- Sounds are synchronized to the action (new XML tag for this)
- Command and Skill format changed, now type is the first tag
- New options for particle systems
- Unit speed changed on XMLs
- Fog of war changes smoothly
- Optimizations on pathfinding
- Optimizations on particle systems
- Crash info is now saved in crash.txt

We want to thank everybody in the board for reporting bugs and contributing to the comunity.

We want to thank Alex Riviere and Cesar Duque for providing us Glest mirrors, we really need them.

I want to thank everybody in the glest team for doing such a good work.

[Tom]

Yikes!

Even though the new version seems great - I won't download it.

28 MB is somewhat too big for my cute little 56k connection...

Is there any chance there might be some alternative smaller version (say: low quality textures) someday?

[martiño]

Glest can't be smaller. Textures aren't big, sound is about the 80% of the size  of the game. I have a 56k modem too and I have uploaded glest to the web more than 10 times.

[enveloop]

That depends on the bitrate at which you encode the file among other things (like if it is variable or not), but the reason why we use the ogg format is that it was easy to implement in the game -plus it is free.  
Personally I don´t think that 28 mb is too much for any game which is fairly complex... and glest already has lots of things inside. Anyway, right now the units´ voices are not compressed because I had some trouble compressing so little files in the past, but I will be doing tests to see if we can save some space on that.

[martiño]

many commercial games (such as UT2004), use OGG, and sound quality is the same (if not better) as in MP3 at the same bitrates

[Tom]

Well: then how about making seperate packages for the game itself without any sound and another download for soundfiles themselfes.

No offence, but sound isn't that good anyway. I could sure live without it. Esp. if I just wanted to "try" the game or if I already got some previous version and just wanted to look what's new.

So people could download the game at a smaller size and if they really like it might decide to download sounds as well. Or (when using DSL) might download and install both packages at once. This might for sure also help decreasing traffic and bandwith to the site.

[StrikerShot21]

I just thought I should put in my two-bit's worth of comments. OGG quality is much better than MP3. The highest bitrate for MP3 is 320kbs I think, OGG's highest bitrate is around 500kbs (making the quality a hell of a lot better). I suggest downloading DBPowerAmp Music Converter (www.dbpoweramp.com) then download the codecs for .OGG files so you can convert MP3 to .OGG

[enveloop]

I encoded the files at 128 kbps, so the maximum bitrate doesn´t matter too much for the sake of the in- game quality of the sounds.

I would suggest not to make any conversion from mp3 to ogg or viceversa for two reasons: first because you are recompressing the file, and second because you can´t get data from where´s no data, I mean, if you get a file compressed at 128 and you recompress it at 500 you won´t recover the frequencies that the previous encoding ripped off.

mp3 is an old format compared to ogg, so if only for that cause ogg should sound better, but we are talking about compressed music (compression of a kind that removes data from the original signal with the hope that you listener won´t notice it) anyway. Plus, the results you get vary a lot depending on the kind of music or audio you encode, so I believe that the best you can do is follow your ears

[StrikerShot21]

whether you are recompressing or not, anyone who has a problem with OGG files should just download DBPowerAmp