Jun 2, 2011
FIFE and Google Summer of Code
Hi all. It’s been a long time and there is some Major news to report. As you may know the Unknown Horizons project, which uses FIFE as it’s engine, was accepted by GSOC this year. We were lucky enough to be awarded one of the Unknown Horizons student slots to work on FIFE specifically. We had a lot of students interested in the project and they were all very qualified so selecting a single student was difficult. After much deliberation we selected Kozmo’s proposal to help improve FIFE’s performance by doing some major work on the OpenGL renderer. The official coding period started on the 23rd of May and Kozmo has already contributed a lot to the project. I would like to take this opportunity and welcome Kozmo to the team! We look forward to working with you now and into the future!
Kozmo’s major work in improving the OpenGL renderer is broken down into several smaller tasks. He has reviewed our code and has begun refining some of the OpenGL calls to be more efficient. This includes keeping track of OpenGL states in the engine rather than querying it directly which saves time and also saves redundant calls. We are also moving to a newer version of OpenGL that gives us access to a lot more OpenGL features including vertex buffers and non power of 2 textures. Some other tasks he is working on right now is to add texture atlas support to minimize the texture changes in OpenGL. This would allow us to potentially render an entire layer in one call! Kozmo already has a working prototype of this and he has seen some major improvement in framerates. Good work Kozmo!
As always if you have any questions feel free to stop by in our IRC channel or drop us a line in our Forums.