MV3D

The main focus of this release is usability, and it includes a large amount of work on tools. Panda3D support is now up to par with animation, terrain texture splatting, and skydomes. One of the things the authors are most excited about is the Windows development environment installer. This is an easy installer which will quickly set up any Windows system to develop MV3D.

This release focuses on scalability of worlds and includes support for splitting a single area across multiple server processes with automatic load balancing and redundancy. Areas can now be connected together using gateways to build worlds limited in size only by the amount of available hardware. The Overseer Cluster Management tool was upgraded in order to better handle many processes across multiple physical servers. Camera controls across all content tools have been unified. Better support for Panda3D clients was added as well.

This release adds several major features such as a path-finding system for computer controlled characters (NPCs) and support for the Panda3D rendering engine. Besides new features, very many bugs have been fixed. Many of these include performance and tool chain fixes. A user manual was added as a reference to new users.

A fully functional content pipeline and world building toolset were added in this release. It is now possible to populate a game world from scratch without using the command line or writing code. Additionally, Ogre was updated to the latest version and a cluster management tool was added.

In this release, the core systems were made ready for tool building and content creation. This included a redesigned persistence mechanism and a cross system GUI layout.