And again a year is nearing its end. Like last year and the year before, I’d like to turn my gaze inwards.

A lot of things happened with xoreos this past year, albeit most of them hidden and “under the hood”:

I wrote about disassembling NWScript bytecode. The tasks I mentioned there are still open, too. If anybody wants to take them up, I’d be happy to explain them in more detail :).

We released xoreos 0.0.4, nicknamed “Chodo”. That was the only release of xoreos in 2016. xoreos 0.0.4 included some minor fixes and features for Neverwinter Nights, and the xoreos-tools package included the new NWScript disassembler.

In April, I reached a streak of a full year of daily xoreos commits. Due to some real life things, I had to take a break there, though. I’m now again at three months of daily commits, but there is a three-month “hole” between April and August.

GitHub contribution graph in April

GitHub contribution graph in November

Animation with glitch Animation without glitch Animations in the HotU intro

Additionally, there are several tasks currently being worked on, among them:

Supermanu is looking into pathfinding.

mirv is still working on rewriting the OpenGL renderer.

I am currently writing unit tests for the xoreos codebase, using Google Test. I already found multiple issues, bugs, and corner cases while adding them.

From my side of things, my current plan is to make my unit tests branch public some time in December. I’ll write a small announcement here about it then. A new release of xoreos, 0.0.5, should follow early next year.

As always, this all wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of people. For them I am thankful.

Farmboy0, for various fixes, implementations and file format spelunking.

Supermanu, for his character generator work and pathfinding research.

mirv, for continuing to work on the OpenGL rewrite.

smbas, for his work on Lua and The Witcher.

berenm, for the AppVeyor integration and CMake knowledge.

TC01, for writing a Fedora specfile for the xoreos projects.

CromFr, for taking a stab at the walkmesh structure in NWN2’s TRN files.

clone2727, for invaluable ideas and corrections.

The folks at GamingOnLinux, who continue to be a great resource for all things related to Games on Linux.

I am also thankful for all the people who take the time to explain things to others, people who write interesting, useful or needed articles, and people who provide mentoring and help. Relatedly: a week ago, Stephanie Hurlburt published an article with engineers who are willing to mentor or answer programming/engineering questions. I for one think that’s a really great idea. Please take a look at that article.

And now, let’s see what the next year has in store for us. If you, however, found all this terribly interesting and would like to help with our little project, then please, feel free to contact us! :)