...and not only beer gardens are putting their lights back on.
In ZERO too, it is now bright as day (or, occasionally dark as night), thanks to our very own God-of-GL, Master of Lights and Overlord-of-OpenGL: Helios  . Spending the past weeks with attempts to implement lighting and  a Day-/Night cycle into the ZERO-world and finally succeeding  while cursing occasionally (read: it wasn't exactly safe for minors).


Technically spoken, this is done using two methods:
First,  the map is shaded using a  command implemented in OpenGL, by which one is able to set strength and color of global light. Secondly, other sources of light are spawned using multi texturing. With this method, multiple textures are blended into one, creating beautiful effects e.g. flickering torches or searchlights. These methods will enable us to increase the atmosphere in ZERO further and offer you a better playing experience.
On this occasion, we would like to thank Helios again. You may now buy him a quantity not less than one of his favorite beverage.

Two funny fails during the implementation.


The lights of  this news ain't out now, because Helios is already planning further optimizations like running multi texturing via different texture units of the graphics card. By using this method, a better performance can be achieved with ZERO, which will come in handy for the planned features.

Unfortunately many members of ZERO are currently busy working or studying (I damn thee, exams!)  therefore are unable to commit fully to the development of ZERO. Nevertheless, we are trying to finish the Demo as soon as posible and maybe cast a ray of light into the dark world of ZERO.

Greatings

the Zero-Projekt Team

Watch this screencapture to see the lighting while movement

• Zero lighting code at work

Edit: added screencapture

Some of you might already know it - our website got a complete overhaul. The changes took us nearly a week, but now we have finished - the Zero-Projekt website is back.

Many changes and improvements have been made. The forum software has been updated and we switched to a new CMS: Redaxo. (Which we would like to praise and approve at this opportunity )

The main drive for this relaunch was to improve the multilanguage aspect and the amount of information about our project. So you will not only find more articles on the main page - they were also completely translated to English. We also separated the forums from the website and introduced a new design for both the forums and the website.

Furthermore, there are some new subdomains available:

• de.zero-projekt.net - German Webseite
• en.zero-projekt.net - English Webseite
• forums.zero-projekt.net - Forums

And - last but not least, we made RSS feeds available for the news (again, for both languages).

Special thanks go to our two community members batgilla and bumsbomber. Batgilla basically initiated the relaunch, and both he and bumsbomber supported us with ideas, remarks and hints during the whole process. Illustrated, that looked like this:


We hope you like our new website and we would also like to encourage you to send us feedback of all kind. If there is something you are still missing or minor hints - it doesn't matter. Just let us know

Cheers,
the Zero-Projekt

We welcome you to our first special about our cRPG project "ZERO - Was vom Morgen blieb".


Due to the current development status of our project we are finally able to provide detailed informations concerning single aspects of Zero.

In contrast to past news, which were genaralised and lacking detail, this news will focus on a single topic - armor.

Because the text has gotten a bit big, this is only a teaser with a short overview, a few (but nice) pictures and the link to a screencapture (on YouTube or as a file)

Topics of the armor special:

• How does the armor system in ZERO work?
• Grouping armor parts
• Seperation of armors
• Abrasion of armors
• Damage types
• How does the armor protection works?
• Which kind of armors / armor parts will Zero have?
• How do the armor modifications work?
• Does every armor part change the visual appearance of my character?
• Why is Zero not using animation-overlays?

The armor special can be found on our forums, in the section "Zero infos"


Video of the armor special

• Original version [*.ogg, ~9 MB]

Cheers,
the Zero-Projekt team