FIFE community & development blog

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.

Right on schedule for FIFE 0.3.0.  We have now (after a lot of work) completed work on the build_system_rework branch and have re-integrated it back into trunk. There has been a lot of changes to the build system.  Here is a list of some of the changes we have made:

• Re-wrote most of the build system
• Added a lot of new build targets including fife-static, fife-shared, fife-python, fife-swig, fife and projects
• Added install targets including install-shared, install-static, install-python, install-dev and install-all
• Changed where fife.py and the fife python library get copied.  They now get copied to <FIFE>/engine/python/fife after being built
• Changed the location of the fife extensions.  They are now located in <FIFE>/engine/python/fife/extensions
• Moved rio_de_hola and the pychan_demo to <FIFE>/demos
• Moved the editor and some misc tools to <FIFE>/tools
• Created a new Windows FIFE Development Kit which includes a new version of SCons.  Win32 users require this NEW Development Kit if they want to use trunk
  
• Updated guichan to 0.8.2 in <FIFE>/ext
• Removed openal-soft and UnitTest++ from <FIFE>/ext
• Changed how clients import fife.  See this page for more information.  Also updated rio_de_hola and the editor to import fife like this
• SCons 1.2 is now a requirement

For more information and help on the new build system check out the Building:SCons article on the wiki.  It describes all the targets and scons options in more details.

If you find any problems with the new build system please let us know ASAP!!  The FIFE 0.3.0 release date is near we need to resolve any issues that come up as quickly as possible.  You can do this by following the filing a bug report document on the wiki, on the forums or in IRC.

We apologize for the lengthy update time for trunk.  We moved rio_de_hola to a different directory which makes svn have to re-ckeckout all  of rio’s assets.  Rest assured we have no plans to move it again in the future.   Sorry for the inconvenience.

Known Issues:

• At this moment we have not updated the code-block project files.  Anyone who uses code-blocks will most likely have issues building FIFE.
• mingw users will not be able to compile debug binaries as there is an issue linking against the release versions of the python libraries.

It’s getting down to crunch time. We have been working very hard to get everything ready for the quickly approaching 0.3.0 release date.  Check out the release schedule for a detailed schedule of the release plan.

The build_system_rework branch is almost complete. We are in the process of adding all the finishing touches to it and making it as developer and user friendly as possible. If anyone is interested in testing it out let us know. A few things have changed in the way this branch works.  We have added a lot of new build and install targets!  FIFE can now be installed in the users python directory which makes packagers lives a lot easier!  For windows developers you will require a new development kit which is temporarily available here. For more information you can also check out Ticket #328.

In other exciting news there is now a FIFE MacPort available. This port was built from the build_system_rework branch and has not been tested yet. The official release of this MacPort will be after the FIFE 0.3.0 release.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to FIFE and for your continued support. We really appreciate the effort everyone has put into this project and hope to see it continue to grow in the new year!

Happy holidays from the FIFE team!

We are  happy to report that the long awaited FIFE 0.3.0 release will happen on January 20th, 2010! This is the first release with the new version scheme. We are hoping that the new scheme will enable us to continue to provide you releases on a more regular basis. We are almost complete work in the build_system_rework branch and plan to merge it into trunk before we release.   Once the branch is complete testers will be required on all platforms to help ensure we aren’t introducing any unwanted bugs to the build system.  An announcement will be made when we are ready for that.  Until then you are welcome to check out the build_system_rework branch and give us any feedback on the forums.