Update: Riven X 0.5 is now available.
There it is at last, a new binary release of Riven X. This new version is of course far beyond the previous release. Some highlights:
- Basic hotspots are working (mouse up and mouse down), which means you can walk around the islands, flip switches, push buttons, and so on.
- Major improvements in movie and audio rendering. Ambient sounds now fade in and fade out correctly.
- Game variables are implemented and have sane default values, which means simple puzzles should be working correctly.
Of course, there’s still a lot of work left to be done. CD media is still not supported, transitions are not rendered, there are a lot of stability and performance issues left to address, many opcodes and all external functions are missing, water animation is not implemented, saving and loading games are not implemented and full-screen is not available yet.
In addition, this new release comes with Sparkle, the popular technology for self-updating applications. All development builds are set to check a development appcast which gets automatically updated daily with a fresh build from Subversion. In short, Riven X will update itself to the latest revision automatically every day. I hope this will help get new versions into the hands of testers more rapidly.
I’ll be preparing a short series of posts about useful tricks for finding problems and using the debug console in the coming days. In the meantime, enjoy this new release.
Download Riven X 0.4 (4.60 MB). A permanent link is available in the blog’s sidebar.