Frontend

Development and testing of Frontend 2.0 is going forward every day, and we are now ready to announce the next public beta release on November 15th 2007. This update will feature the following:

• A new Utils::Audio namespace for high level sound functionality, and an OGG audio stream loader.
• A new Utils::Xml namespace for representing and traversing xml data, and an XML loader.
• A revised version of the FSG  format, classes and loader which now supports skeletal animation and skinning properly.
• An implementation of the Sound interface for Linux, which now makes Frontend 2.0 fully implemented on Linux :).
• New classes for managing threads and mutexes added to the core API.
• Several bugfixes.

In other news, we are also working on a new concept called Frontend Effects and an associated file format (.ffx) which associates shaders, render states, sampler states, textures and multiple passes into a single Effect object (similar to CgFX and Direct3D-effects). This might be included in the next beta if it gets finished.

A port for MacOS X has also been started on and is scheduled to be included in Beta 3.

Thanks to everyone who has helped out implementing, testing and given feedback. Please do so by joining the IRC channel #frontend on EFnet (i.e. irc.homelien.no).