PixelLight

As you may have noticed, our server was down for almost a day. This was caused by a hard disk failure that prevented the server from booting. Fortunatly, while the server failed to boot, all other content was still accessible, so I could migrate the whole system to the new hard disk after it was installed. So the server is now up and running again :-)

We also have a forum now which you can find at https://dev.pixellight.org/forum or http://dev.pixellight.org/forum. We first tried to use a sourceforge forum, but that was either too simple or too much filled with ads, so we decided to host our own here, even though many of the other services like the GIT repository have moved to sourceforge.

The forum still has to be configured, I'm sure Christian will take care of that, soon.

We have been asked several times now, why there is no PixelLight forum.

First of all, there *is* the mailing list, which you can find here:
http://www.pixellight.org/site/index.php/page/community.html

It is open and could be used for discussion about PixelLight for quite some time now, however unfortunately it is not used very often.

Other projects also just have mailing lists and seem to do fine so, so I don't really understand why so many people don't use those although they are there and we have announced them several times. It's of course a matter of personal taste, some like forums some like mailing lists, there is just not a "right" way for everyone.

So I would like to know from you: What whould you prefer? Do you want mailing lists, or do you want a forum? Please leave your comment here so we can see what the majority of PixelLight users want.

If you decide you want a forum, we will do that. However I will close the mailing lists then, because I don't think it's a good idea to split up the community right away from the start. We should discuss at one place and not several places for now, since the community is still too small to be divided over several places.

So, what do you want? Please let us know :-)

After one week, we've already received a lot of feedback and questions over various channels. That's really great and we hope that the discussion about PixelLight will not stop too soon.

However, as much of the discussion is taking place on the blog comments, we thought that we should point you to our wiki and mailing lists, which seem to be mostly undiscovered yet ;-)

PixelLight public mailing list:

http://lists.pixellight.org/listinfo/pixellight

PixelLight Wiki:

http://developer.pixellight.org/wiki

Please feel free to subscribe to the mailing list for your questions and/or discussion about PixelLight. And in the wiki you can already find some additional tutorials and documentations for PixelLight, but there is more of it needed, especially more tutorials and howtos for artists would be really nice. So we would be glad if some of you would like to contribute to our wiki, too :-)

We've received a lot of reports that the demos don't run on many of your Windows systems. Symptoms are that the demos just "don't start" and if you then have a look into the log file, you will find something like this:

[Error]: C:\PLDungeonDemo_Windows_23082010\PLRendererOpenGL.plugin: Can't load the plugin library 'C:/PLDungeonDemo_Windows_23082010/PLRendererOpenGL.dll'
[Error]: Can't create renderer context instance: PLRendererOpenGL::Renderer

We've looked into that and found out that one of our runtime dependencies for the OpenGL renderer plugin was still using the MSVC Debug runtime. So on computers that do not have MSVC installed, this is not available and therefore it fails silently when the system tries to load the OpenGL plugin (PLRendererOpenGL.dll).

We've fixed this problem and uploaded new demo packages, please tell us if it works for you now.

The problem also applies to the SDK, of course, and we're currently creating a new package for that as well. This will just take a little longer, so stay tuned :-)

Update:

The SDK has been updated, so the problem should now be solved for both the demos and the SDK. You can download the newest PixelLight SDK (Version 0.9.2-R2) from the download page. There is no new version for linux, because this bug only applied to the Windows version.

Finally, we have released our work as open source and our homepage is public now. Enjoy, and tell us, what you think!