Well folks, it's finally here! Version 1.1.0 is now available for download in the downloads section. I know it's been a long time since the last release (almost 6 months) so I'd like to thank everybody for being patient. The reason for the long wait is that I embarked on quite a few major changes all in one go and it has taken this long to finish them all off. In future I will concentrate on one thing at a time and try to make more regular releases. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Please come visit the forum to leave your comments.

One thing I should mention is that the Kong Patcher has been removed for various reasons. So please download the installer to get a fresh copy of the game. If you have created any maps that you would like to keep then it would be a good idea to back these up before upgrading. To do this just copy the "maps" subdirectory to somewhere safe.

Here's your chance to show off your Kong skills, the CSCup LAN party hosted in Namur, Belgium will include a Kong deathmatch tournament. There are some prizes to be won and a chance to meet our art director kiwi :). So if you live in the area it's well worth checking it out. It will take place on the 28, 29 and 30th of March, good luck!

I'm pleased to announce that Roland Shaw has joined the development team and is going to be our sound guy. He has already replaced almost all of the existing sounds in the game and created some new ones. You can listen to some of his previous work on his website: http://www.rolandshaw.com/. You will be able to listen to his creations in the next version of Kong. Speaking of which, it will be released as version 1.1 rather than 1.0.3 because there will be a considerable number of new features in this version, the main ones are:

• Re-coded the lightmapping algorithm to increase performance
• Added a new Jungle theme
  
• Re-designed the GUI, now using libRocket instead of CEGUI
• Added new coco-flash weapon which can be used to blind enemies
• Exploding monkeys (gibbed) when killed from an explosion

There are also a whole load of smaller changes that I won't list here but they'll be in the change log. I realise it has been a while since the last release but I hope the wait will be worth it. In the future I will try not to make so many changes at once so that smaller releases can be made more frequently.

Version 1.0.3 is coming along nicely, on the programming side I have been spending a lot of time optiming the game so hopefully if you've been getting bad frame rates this should be improved. The shadow generation code has been re-written and is now a lot faster.

On the art side of things, kiwi has been working on a new jungle theme which I think looks very nice. A new theme system has been implemented to support this, it is done in such a way that themes can be switched without needing to rebuild the map. The screenshots section has been updated to showing off parts of the new theme.

Here is a direct link to the first screenshot:

First of all, Happy new year to everybody! I have some good news, a while a go we put our friend Nikolas in charge of finding us a dedicated server to run Kong 24/7. As always, he hasn't failed to deliver, Yves Decleyre has kindly agreed to lend us one of his servers for the month of January. These servers are usually available for rental (http://www.ghalan.be/).

The only issue is that it is running under linux and I have not yet been able to compile Kong for the linux operating system. I have spent the last few days setting up the build system and making modifications to the code to compile with gcc. Hopefully I will be able to get the Kong server up and running soon.

Update: Unfortunately I am unable to get Kong to operate correctly on Linux due to a bug in the current release of the PhysX library. I've been told the bug has been fixed and that it will be in the next release (v2.8.0), so until then I'm afraid the dedicated server will have to wait.