Currently planning for a “preview release”, Turtle Arena 0.5.0 release early June 2011, if not sooner. Development has been going on for 6 months since the last major release, so I’m just try to finish up somethings before release. I referred to it as a preview release as it is a preview of Turtle Arena 0.6, but will likely have some issues and missing features intended to be in the 0.6 release.

Changes since last development status.

* Did some work on ioquake3, helped add/fix/finish IQM (Inter-Quake Model) support, redid model and sound locate/load code. All of this has been imported from ioquake3 into Turtle Arena as usual.

* Got the Turtle Arena Client to build for Wii, though it is not useable yet.

* MacOSX builds are more likely to work now, though I’ve never tested it on MacOSX.

* Single player no longer shows loading item icons and names, their could be secret items in single player. Which probably means it should be disabled in all gametypes, otherwise players can just load map in another gametype… but I think it look nicer anyway.

* Added a loading image when the game is starting up (but it only works in windowed mode?)

* Made new speed icon and model, blue lightning.

* Added new defense model, yellow shield (like the icon)

* The turtle players now have tails!

* Objects (misc_object entities) can now explode when they are destroyed, use damage alphaGen options, and use skins. Skins can be set per-entity allowing different colored cars and the like.

* Added 3D cel shaded smoke model for explosions. (In the future I will likely replace all 2D smoke and explosions with 3D models.) It is currently used by misc_object explosions and missile explosions.

* Other misc fixes.