Boson 0.6: A New Milestone

After a bit of a hiatus, Boson (screenshots), the Real Time Stragegy game for KDE, is back in swing. Since development restarted in late 2001, the game has been completely rewritten and ported to libkdegames. As a result of the recent development, Boson 0.6 has been released. The full announcement is below.

Release of Boson 0.6, a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game for the K Desktop Environment.

After a year long hiatus (the last release being in October, 2000), Boson was revived by a new set of developers. It is now completely ported to KGame in libkdegames, which provides player and network management. Boson 0.6 is a complete rewrite from its predecessor, with not a single line of code remaining untouched.

Boson still requires a minimum of two players, as there is not yet an artificial intelligence. The game is still under heavy development and 0.6 is merely a milestone rather than a fully playable game. We are in need of more developers, especially graphics artists. If you have any spare time and the ability to code in Qt/C++ or know your way around a graphics program, please feel free to pop in and offer a hand.

Because of recent changes in the source code, the 0.6 release does not include the map editor (see here for an explanation). We have, however, been working very hard to ensure that this the only limitation compared to the last release (0.5). Due to the massive overhaul necessary to bring Boson to this point, a changelog was not possible.

Major changes and additions since version 0.5:

• auto-shoot: Defensive buildings automatically shoot at enemies when they are in range. Normal units do not do this yet.
• split views: you can split a display and play at several places on the map at once
• full network capability (please note that single player mode is quite boring without an AI)
• fog of war
• mineral/oil harvesting (experimental)
• fullscreen mode
• Map and scenario files are now XML based (was originally binary). All units can be configured using KConfig syntax
• music, sound and speech
• pathfinding (thanks to some excellent work by it's hacker!)
• Most units actually have "sense", e.g. if your Comsat station is destroyed your minimap will disappear.

Dependencies

To compile and install Boson, you will need (other than the usual compiler tools):

• Qt 3 (see http://www.trolltech.com)
• KDE 3 (see http://www.kde.org)
• kdelibs
• kdegames (at least libkdegames)
• kdemultimedia for sound support (might not compile without it, as we didn't test)

Please note that you need the development files (e.g. headers) of all these packages. We do not (yet) provide binary packages.

Installing Boson

There are two methods of installing Boson (from tarballs). The easier way is to grab boson-all-0.6.tar.bz2. However, that file is very big, and if you are on a slow connection, you may wish to just get the code and data packages. The required packages can be found here.

Let me say that again: download either boson-all or both boson-code and boson-data. Do not waste your time downloading all three!

If you decided to grab the individual packages, you can optionally download the music files for Boson here.

The installation itself:

Decompress the package(s):
% tar xjvf <package name>
cd into each directory and:
% ./configure
% make
As root:
# make install

Tarball checksums and sizes for the paranoid:
File name               Size    MD5 Checksum
boson-all-0.6.tar.bz2   27.6 MB 92e5b16f3bdc7d31238d23d298793e15
boson-code-0.6.tar.bz2  501 kB  3d7b8b3967c5ada20b0ae80c56517aad
boson-data-0.6.tar.bz2  10.9 MB 0e470b3f089424da3dc1cb05a0230a6b
boson-music-0.6.tar.bz2 16.6 MB f777b7a232ef55eb23c0b547fc335873

The Boson Team