Release Notes for Version 1.4.10

Release date: July 25, 2008

• A new cross-platform voice chat system has been added to the engine as the Audio Capture Manager. In a multiplayer game, audio can be captured on each player's machine, compressed using a variable bit-rate algorithm, and distributed through the server to the other players in the game. In the demo game, there are options for enabling or disabling sending and receiving of voice chat, and there's a volume control for received voice chat.

• Each Player object that corresponds to a player in a game is now part of a graph that represents the voice communication channels among all of the players. Voice chat is only sent from player A to player B if there exists a channel starting at player A and ending at player B. A channel is an edge in the player graph encapsulated by the Channel class. The demo game automatically establishes channels among all players who have enabled voice chat receipt, but more complex arrangements such as team chat can be set up.

• It is now possible for a remote portal to span multiple zones so that a single large portal can be used in several zones in cases when a reflective or refractive surface is bigger than a single room. To use this functionality, just add a connector to each zone (other than the portal's owning zone) and link it to the remote portal.

• The S3TC texture compression algorithm built into the engine has been significantly improved in this release, both in terms of image quality and speed.

• Due to some serious limitations in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), we will only be supporting Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) beginning with this release. The Mac project files now require Xcode 3. It's still possible to build the engine under earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it will require making your own project files for Xcode 2 and working around the dynamic loader limitations (for which one solution is to hard-code an absolute installation path for the C4.app bundle).