FIFE community & development blog

GSoC 2012 Student

prock — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:19:21 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have a single student working specifically on FIFE this summer for GSoC 2012. Vasilis Daras (vdaras) has been accepted and he will be working on improving our GUI support which includes improvements to our existing GUI library, Guichan along with Pychan (Guichan’s python counterpart). He is also planning on adding support for multiple other GUI libraries like CEGUI and librocket. We are all looking forward to working with vdaras and seeing all the improvement he can bring to FIFE!

Website Maintenance Complete

prock — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:07:59 +0000

Thanks for everyone for being so patient with us as we migrated all of our data between web hosts. It took some time to work out all the kinks but everything should be working as it should now. If you do notice any problem at all please report it as soon as you can so we can rectify it.

Planned Website Maintenance

prock — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:32:40 +0000

On Monday April 23rd, 2012 at around 17:00 GMT we plan to have an outage to our blog, forums, and wiki. This does not affect our Trac system or repository. We are changing hosts so we expect the outage to last a couple hours while we ensure proper operation of everything. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

0.3.3r3 Released

prock — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:55:56 +0000

Here we are again with another update to FIFE. A lot of work has been done since the 0.3.3r2 release so we thought another release was in order. This release includes a lot of new functionality along with a lot of bug fixes which include (but not exclusive to):

C++ Loader implementation
Images created by effects are now owned by ImageManager and freed if no longer used after 60 seconds
Mouse location can now be set and retrieved as a tuple in Python
Added support for True Type Collection fonts
Major optimization to getMatchingInstances()
TargetRenderer no longer needs a map to work
Better zip file support
Child widgets now correctly report if they are hidden or not
Better hidden child widget support
Major editor improvements

Users can now specify an additional plugin directory for the editor
Toolbars can now be docked/undocked again
ObjectEditor plugin now displays animations as expected
Added the InstanceHighlighter plugin
Re-factored ObjectSelector plugin
Re-factored ObjectEdit

Added a getRevision() function to allow clients to query which revision FIFE was built from
Removed some unnecessary warning messaged from FIFE::Model that made the debug output virtually impossible to sift through.

… and many more. To see a full list of changes see the 0.3.3r3 changelog. To download this release check out our download page. Stay tuned for our next release, as you know we are participating in GSoC this year so there should be many interesting changes to FIFE this summer!

April 2012 Development Kit – Attention Windows Developers!

prock — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:34:20 +0000

The April 2012 Development Kit is now available to be downloaded. This only affects you if you are using FIFE on Windows and would like to compile trunk. Note that as of revision 3905 the April 2012 kit is required! You can find it on sourceforge here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fife/files/active/sdks/

Enjoy!

GSoC 2012

prock — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:38:22 +0000

We have some exciting news once again for you, Unknown Horizons has been accepted once again by Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization! For those that don’t know Unknown Horizons is an open source game that uses FIFE as it’s engine. Last year UH acted as an umbrella corporation for us allowing us to mentor a single student for GSoC and we are hoping to do the same again this year. Last year was a great success, Kozmo (last years GSoC student who worked on FIFE) helped the engine by updating our OpenGL renderer and adding image atlas support, amongst other things. We had some great performance improvements as a result. Check out the ideas page and start working on your applications! Hope to work with YOU this year!

0.3.3r2 Released!

prock — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:28:47 +0000

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.

0.3.3 has arrived!

prock — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:38:56 +0000

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

Of course that only scratches the surface. To see a full list of changes check out the 0.3.3 CHANGELOG.

I hope everyone enjoys this release as much as I have enjoyed working on it. Thanks to everyone who contributed. We could not have done it without you!

Even more stuff for your eyes!

Unknown-Horizons News — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:23:00 +0000

Yeah, lot of progress here recently, so we'll again show two cool pics. We today constructed a new in-game pause menu that hopefully is easier to work with (and distinguish from our main menu) than b...

Preview of new assets!

Unknown-Horizons News — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:26:00 +0000

Heya! just decided to throw in some of the most recent contributions by wentam since they're too cool to keep almost secret :-) The most impressive one is our animated wooden tower equipped with can...