OpenTomb gains more and more recognition - in the last month we've been spotted on Reddit, which resulted in enormous amount of people visiting our thread on Tomb Raider Forums. We have great new contributors in our team, particularly stohrendorf, stltomb, nhfl, vvs- and ablepharus - and currently engine is being heavily refactored from plain C to C++. Also we've finally migrated from SourceForge to Github, thanks to Richard_trle, and started to rewrite file format documentation (it was almost 15 years old) - which is now known as TRosettaStone 3.0 document.
Right now, over 6 programmers are working simultaneously on the project (but it doesn't mean we don't need help anymore!). Ok, now for the real news!
Most important of all - we're now finally implementing fully scriptable entities! Each object in game world can now be individually programmed and modified on the fly, thanks to Lua. Currently, only small amount of game objects are programmed - like doors, traps, certain movable objects and some basic NPCs, like Thames Wharf cleaner robot. However, we still have no proper AI, and all enemies are static.
Another breakthrough feature is ragdoll physics for Lara. Old Tomb Raiders were plagued by inconsistent death animations not taking level geometry into account - now this problem is solved by converting Lara to ragdoll, after she played her default death animation. Theoretically, it is now possible to assign ragdolls for any skeletal model, but it requires writing extra ragdoll scripts.
Also, there is now possibility to spawn arbitrary amount of entities in the world, which means we can use dart emitters, grenades and certain projectiles! For latter case, there's still need for proper weapon wielding system (not yet implemented).
Finally, we have full support for native audiotracks streaming! It means you can use original CDAUDIO.WAD file from Tomb Raider 3, as well as wave soundtracks from TR4 and TR5. TR1 and TR2 still require OGG-converted music, as nobody uses CD-Audio these days.
There are some more important features in development - for example, PSX and Dreamcast file format support and camera target functionality by Gh0stBlade. Also, we're glad to announce that IrisEngine project (another Tomb Raider engine clone) developer, godmodder, is now rewriting his level editor codebase to work with brand new OpenTomb level format - so we're getting completely new level editor! Don't you think it's just great?
More things to follow!
