Author: JT Smith
AURAN Jet® was created to support independent game developers by providing game architecture in order to create interactive entertainment with less expense.
Auran has created a dedicated AURAN Jet® Web site, which contains in-depth information on AURAN Jet®, including regular updates on documentation, tips and tricks, forums, example code, bug reports and developer demos. The Beta 2 public release also features extensive documentation.
AURAN Jet® Beta 2 builds upon the feature set in Beta 1 and includes the following additions:
· Progressive Mesh Reduction Support
· Collision Detection & Physics System Implementation
· AI Infrastructure and example
· DirectX Support – Both OpenGL and DirectX are now supported in AURAN Jet®
· General Networking Improvements – channel management, session-joining procedure, still-online checking, etc.
· AURAN Jet® Network System – message management: guaranteed delivery, message order preservation, large messages, multicasting, compression, etc.
· TCP/IP Support
· Host Migration – peer-to-peer sessions continue when the session host leaves the session.
· Client-Server Optimization
· Network Lobby Support – The NetworkLobbyDirectX plug-in provides connections to external launchers built using the DirectX Lobby API.
· Network Statistics
· Plugin Managment System
· Localization Support – Low-level multi-byte support has been added to AURAN Jet®. The Input and Interface Systems now support extended character sets.
· Drag and Drop
· Plugin Support for the Interface & Resource Systems
· Improved Animation – The skeletal, key-framed animation system now supports blending and sub-bone animation.
· Optimized Dynamic Lighting
· Material properties – AURAN Jet® now supports ambient, diffuse, and emissive components for materials with and without textures.
· Volumetric Shadows – AURAN Jet® can now use the stencil buffer to generate shadows.
· Multi-Texturing Support
· Change Textures on Loaded Meshes
· MP3 Support
· 3D Studio Max v3.1 Mesh Exporter – Now includes support for both Progressive and Fixed Resolution Meshes.
· Multithreaded support – A number of classes and systems (including File, PString, String and the Log system) have been modified to ensure correct behaviour when used simultaneously across multiple threads
· AURAN Jet® Tutorial – This extended example implements a simple but complete, functional network game. It provides a sample architecture, identifies and describes core application components and introduces a number of game concepts (To be released separately from the Beta 2 release).”
