FIFE community & development blog

After releasing 0.3.3 we quickly started getting reports of some issues with it.  We decided that because 0.3.4 is a ways away that the best thing to do would be to release a fix release for 0.3.3.  This release addresses one major problem with 0.3.3 and some ATI cards/drivers.  Some users with specific card/driver combinations in Windows were reporting black screens when trying to run any client.  After some debugging we found that with these card/driver combos that the OpenGL framebuffer and NPOT textures were not implemented correctly.  To address the issue we added two new FIFE settings to disable the framebuffer and NPOT textures.  Along with those settings we managed to fit a lot of changes in this release including:

• Major overhaul of the instance matching routines.  They are now much faster and more accurate.
• Added mouse sensitivity and acceleration options.
• Fixed some problems with memory in the Image Manager.
• Dragging the mouse (with a mouse button down) now behaves as expected.
• 1024×600 is now a valid resolution to run FIFE
• PyChan widgets can now be shown/hidden even if they are not the top container widget.
• Editor icons have been replaced with free ones

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

In other news we are planning on changing our release strategy a little bit.  We want to avoid having to release these “fix” releases.  The plan is to release a “release candidate” sometime before we actually release 0.3.4 to allow for more testing to be done.  Hopefully this prevents us from having to re-release a few weeks after.