MV3D Development Blog

February 19, 2011

MV3D Goes Beta!

Filed under: Uncategorized — SirGolan @ 3:25 pm

MV3D 0.50 has just been released! This release took quite a bit longer than intended and ended up being 2 months late. On the flip side, there’s a lot of new functionality such as support for the Panda3D rendering engine and a path-finding system for NPCs. In addition, many bugs were squashed and the performance problems of the last release are pretty much gone.

What Went Right:

  • Panda3D support is great!
  • The NavMesh + A* path-finding system is pretty much industry standard and includes automatic NavMesh generation.
  • A client Patching System is available complete with patch building tool.
  • Documentation. There is now a User Manual.
  • 50 bug tickets closed! This is the most stable release to date.

What Went Wrong:

  • Underestimated the time it would take to write a fully functional NavMesh generator, which extended the release by 2 months.
  • Started documentation too late in the project (this isn’t specific to this release).
  • It is still pretty hard to configure a whole cluster. This will be addressed in the next release.
  • MV3D’s tools could use a polish pass and more documentation.

I’m very excited about the next version as well. One of the planned features is splitting up of areas across multiple servers. Another big push is for making MV3D more accessible to new users. Part of that is expanding the user manual as well as simplifying configuration.

For more information on MV3D, see the website at www.mv3d.com, or the release notes. There is also a #MV3D chat room on irc.freenode.net which has been getting more use lately. If you don’t have an IRC client such as mIRC, Pidgin, or Trillian, you can use the web interface.

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