FIFE community & development blog

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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