TemplePlus News

A Look On The Plus Side

Dateline April 16, 2015 Middle East

Hello again, and welcome to the TemplePlus news thread!

I'd like to share with you some of our goals and plans for the coming months, and tell you a little about what goes on behind the scenes, so to speak (this is an open source project after all!).

TemplePlus is a code hooking and extension project, founded upon deep analysis of ToEE's machine code. That, however, is a bit of an understatement - what we're really doing is documenting, exposing and recreating entire systems within our code. This is our focus right now - laying down the foundations upon which new content and features can be built. Along the way, we fix long known issues - an example being the recently committed Secret Door bugfix. We use these issues as stepping stones for analyzing and recreating their concomitant systems, and in so doing pave the way for future content expansion.

Work continues apace... can you tell April 05 was a weekend?​

There's more to it, though, a lot more. DarkStorm is hard at work on core engine enhancements and integrating external libraries that will substantially increase the tools and capabilities at our disposal. A primary example of this is the switch from D3D8 to D3D9, and an optional toggle for D3D9Ex, which will allow us to do various cool things down the road. More to come on that...

Our plan for the near future is to release an alpha version - it should be out this weekend, actually. We invite our community members to take part in stress testing it so we can have as solid a release as possible!

After that, we will continue with integrating TemplePlus with the modpack - there are several features planned that will make life a lot easier, for developers and players alike. We hope to be done with that in a month, after which we will enter the Beta Testing phase - an essentially feature complete version that will lead into a full modpack release. This will be TemplePlus 1.0, which is focused on getting the platform out there and into widespread use.

Beyond 1.0, it's all about adding new features, fixing issues and so on. We can think of some things we want to do... how about you?