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.

I am pleased to announce that we have released FIFE 0.3.3!  The official release date was October 6th,2011 but I didn’t get around to writing this announcement until today.  All files are available in the download section of our wiki.  This release was a long time coming but it includes a lot of changes.

Special thanks go out to the Unknown Horizons team for making this release possible.  We were fortunate enough to get a student for GSoC this year through them so we are all very grateful.  The summer of code turned out to be very successful and our student (kozmo) made some huge performance improvments in the OpenGL renderer and added a lot of great features.  Thanks Kozmo!

There was so many changes to FIFE in this release so I’m not going to list them all.  Here is a quick summary of all the key improvements:

• Many optimizations/improvements to the OpenGL renderer
• Colour overlays have been optimized
• Can now draw/modify images
• Resource pools have been completely re-written from the ground up
• Clients can now specify the colour to use when clearing the screen
• Some changes/optimizations to the light renderer
• Initial support for C++ map/object/animation loaders
• Image Atlas support and Atlas editor
• Optimizations to the Guichan graphics renderer

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.

After shipping the 0.3.2 release in November, we have discovered some issues with the packages. Therefore we decided to ship a fixed r2 version of the release so the users can actually utilize the full potential of the engine.

Changelog

These changes went into 0.3.2r2 release:

• Instances now inherit blocking property from objects (#514)
• Added additional flag to Instance for overriding blocking attribute (r3520)
• FIFE::Exception is now derived from std::runtime_error (#511)
• Fixed the image/animation functions to consider zoom level (r3513)
• Added the light editor plugin (r3513)
• FIFE now builds on Fedora as expected

Thanks to everyone who has made that release possible!

Download FIFE 0.3.2r2

You can grab FIFE 0.3.2r2 packages for your platform at the download section of the wiki.

Planet FIFE now online

On a related note: we’re proud to annouce that Planet FIFE is now available! Planet FIFE is a project activity RSS feed aggregator. It’s prolly the easiest way for community members and developers to stay up to date about FIFE development. Feel free to check it out! In case you’re working on a FIFE-based game and have a development blog for it as well, please give us a pointer if you would like to see your dev blog aggregated there as well. Right now the Planet tracks the PARPG, Unknown Horizons and Zero-Projekt development blogs.

That’s all for today Happy FIFEing

Heya dear community

Welcome to another release announcement for FIFE. Packages of the 0.3.2 release are finally available now.

This release was focused mainly on getting the light system – that was developed in a branch – into the trunk. Special thanks to helios2k who worked on this specific task, invested quite some time into it and did a formidable job!

Some of the changes of note for 0.3.2 include:

• Added light support (OpenGL only) by merging the light branch. (#364)
• Added the ability to change screen modes on the fly. This works both in OpenGL and SDL modes. (#315)
• Timers are now handled correctly by pychan (#483)
• Added the Shooter demo

For a full list of changes please visit the 0.3.2 change log.

To download the new version of FIFE please visit our download page on the Wiki.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this release a possibility. We hope to continue to provide you with regular releases of FIFE to help make developing a game with FIFE a lot easier to manage.

Enjoy!

Heya and welcome to a short news update at the blog. As pointed out in the headline: the FIFE devs were working hard behind the scenes and the release of FIFE 0.3.2 is pretty close. If everything goes as planned, the release will be shipped some time between Friday, 19th of November and Sunday, 21st of November.

So with the new release in sight, we wanted to fix some problems of the current version of the FIFE win32 devkit. Besides updating some tools (mingw compiler, SWIG, scons-local) that ship with it, we were finally able to track down the MSVC debugging issues. The new devkit ships with a custom built sdl_d.dll for MSVC 2005 & MSVC 2008 that fixes debugging for these compilers.

Furthermore the new devkit also introduces Python 2.7 support on Win32. Python 2.7 is now the only officially supported version of Python on Windows. So while you can still use Python 2.6 for the time being, you’ll have to manually update your build scripts in this case. Check out the details in the README that ships with the devkit, but keep in mind that using Python 2.6 is not officially supported anymore so proceed at your own risk!

We recommend to use ActivePython 2.7 in combination with FIFE on Win32, as the standard Python 2.7 distro has some PATH issues that you can avoid by using ActivePython: download ActivePython 2.7

The new devkit is available in two flavours:

1. Win32 installer version
2. ZIP version

We’ve checked that the installer is clean, but for the ones who are very cautious or prefer to have an archive that they can simply unpack instead of an installer, grab the ZIP version.

Let us know in case you run into any issues with the new Win32 devkit. The release of the new FIFE version is still over 1.5 weeks away, so we still got enough time to apply any necessary fixes to either FIFE itself or to the devkit.

You can preview the README file that ships with the devkit online. It contains all required information how to upgrade from older devkit versions to the latest release: preview devkit README in trac

Update

The link for the win32 installer version of the devkit has been fixed! It was linking to the ActivePython installer before, sorry for the trouble. Thanks to vtchill for the pointer

A big thanks to Phoku and Helios for making this a reality. We have now removed all O(N) instance lookups from FIFE. We have heard reports of some people getting 50% + better performance when operating at a regular zoom level.  Phoku did most of the work and Helios was able to find several pesky bugs that plagued the branch.  Also thanks to all the people who took time to help us test everything.  Your help/input was greatly appreciated!

Until next time…

Hello everyone and welcome to another release announcement for FIFE. That’s right, two releases in the span of 2 months!

This release was focused mainly on taking care of some pesky bugs. Unfortunately we were unable to fix all the bugs we wanted to because of some issues with one of our dependencies (namely guichan and it’s event system).  For the most part we took care of everything we set out to fix.

Some of the changes of note for 0.3.1 include:

• Added color key support
• You can now add event listeners to the front of the listener list
• The VFS no longer transforms all filenames to lowercase
• A few build system fixes
• OpenBSD support
• Many Editor fixes

For a full list of changes please visit the 0.3.1  change log.

To download the new version of FIFE please visit our download page on the Wiki.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this release a possibility.  We hope to continue to provide you with regular releases of FIFE to help make developing a game with FIFE a lot easier to manage.

Enjoy!

Here we are with another short FIFE update. Since FIFE 0.3.0 has been released we have been busy working on FIFE 0.3.1 and have been making a lot of progress as the release date nears.  Unfortunately when we merged the build_system_rework branch into trunk the online epydocs stopped being updated. I just got word from MuteX that he was able to fix the job that updates the epydocs.  They are now online for your viewing pleasure.

We have some great news! The FIFE team has been working hard and finally after all that work we have finished work on FIFE 0.3.0. It has been a very long time since our last release so this is pretty big news for FIFE.  You can grab a copy of FIFE 0.3.0 on our download page in various formats.  A lot has changed since the last official release so we encourage all to check it out.

Some of the major changes in FIFE 0.3.0 include:

• Moved to Python 2.6
• Added UTF8 support
• SCons build system has been completely re-written
• Added adaptive pathfinding
• Completely re-written editor with plugin support

Of course there are many other bug fixes.  Check out the CHANGES file included in the FIFE source package for a more detailed list of all the changes.

Another thing to note is we have removed the demos from the source packages as to greatly reduce the size.  This was requested by package maintainers as they generally like keeping file sizes to a minimum.  Have no fear the demos are now available as a separate download.  All you have to do is install FIFE and extract the demos wherever you like and you’ll be able to test drive FIFE 0.3.0.

Check out some of the new features in action:

UTF8 Support

New Editor

That’s all we have for now.  Stay tuned as the FIFE team has already started working on FIFE 0.3.1.   If you find any bugs or issues with 0.3.0 let us know by filing a bug report.