Welcome to yet another FIFE news update, this time it's a rather important one. You've prolly already noticed that there was not much SVN activity after the last official release last month. Phoku is busy with his exams and jobs and won't have time for FIFE in the next couple of months. As everyone who's still left on the team seems to be incredibly busy too I want to send an SOS to all FIFE fans out there.

There were no major code additions to our Subversion repository since about one month. So if no wonder happens this phase of slowdown will probably last for several months. We know that nobody is eagerly awaiting to join a team that is in a massive slowdown but our aim was to be always honest about the status of the project. If you know any developer who could help out and would be interested to work on FIFE: don't hesitate to send us a message to our mailing list: fife-public@lists.sourceforge.net

We're in the desperate need of experienced C++ coders who are interested in working on the engine or the editor. If we won't be able to attract new contributors we'll make no big steps forward in the development for the next several months. There is a list with tasks to address for interested developers:
https://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/engine/report/1

Furthermore you should read our getting started guide for developers to find out about the basics of FIFE:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title...ng_started

Last but not least there are also some small signs of hope for the FIFE team. We got two new interested developers on team: labrat and shales. Labrat currently works on a general solver interface and wants to integrate the Micropather pathfinding library into FIFE:
http://www.grinninglizard.com/MicroPather/

Shales works on color-keying for the SDL renderer to speed up the transparency effects with software rendering. But both new developers are rather busy with their real life so their enlistment alone won't help to boost our progress significantly. We hope that someone hears this call for help :-)

Last but not least we're planning to restructure our wiki. mvBarracuda already started to overwork the wiki frontpage and planned more important changes for the next weeks. We would like to get some feedback from the community how they like the new wiki structure and what could be improved:
http://wiki.fifengine.de

See you at the next development update and I hope we can bring you better news next time.

Hi guys :-) Time for yet another FIFE news update.

As you might already know our old editor coder went absent without official leaving and we've been searching for new developers who wanted to work on the editor. Despite the fact that some people were interested in helping out with editor development, none of them did stick to the task in the long run. There is still one guy left on the team who's interested to work on the editor but has no time to do so :-/

So I want to be totally upfront about this: it seems that there will be _NO_ FIFE editor available for the next couple of months. Therefore the editor beta test is on halt. We'll inform you as soon as there is a willing developer around who brought up a serious concept for it and commited some promising code into SVN. I won't announce anything just because we would have found yet another coder interested who silently leaves the project after that. I intend to spare you and myself this drama.

Phoku, the driving force behind FIFE coding in the last months, was hard working in the last two weeks and plans to write a detailed developer blog update in the next couple of days. He'll talk about the upcoming 2007.1 release and the roadmap for the next two releases: 2007.2 & 2007.3.

There are at least a few promising news in spite of the whole editor nightmare:
1. The work on the 2007.1 milestone is coming along good. That means we plan to have more than two FIFE releases in 2007. There is no release date set but I'll inform you about any details as soon as I know more.

2. Phoku finished his map format draft recently. That means the 2007.1 release will feature a somewhat stable map format so you could start creating maps for FIFE (by hand) despite the lack of a map editor:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Map_Format

3. I didn't talk with phoku about all details but I guess that the roadmap, that will be announced in the next days, will feature these basic ideas:
3.1 Stable map format with the 2007.1 release
3.2 Stable animation format with the 2007.2 release
3.3 More fleshed out script API with the 2007.3 release

4. Furthemore we plan to organize a FIFE contest entitled "Send them in!". The idea behind this contest is to encourage the modders to send in their self-created GFX. The FIFE team will have a look at the different contributions and will pick a winner after that. We'll use the winner's gfx for the planned 2007.2 demo map that should show the possibilities of the engine without the need to have one of the two Fallout RPGs installed. There is still a lot of planning to do but it's planned to launch this contest after the release of the 2007.1 milestone.

We plan to get news coverage at NMA as soon as phoku's developer blog update is online, we can hopefully announce more details about the "send them in!" contest too.

That's all for today, see you at the next update.

Phoku revealed the roadmap for the next FIFE releases today and we're planning a GFX contest entitled "Send them in!". You can read about all the details @ our developer blog:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/eng...3/05/08.17

Even more important it seems that we've found an dedicated Mac programmer who wants to provide universal binaries of FIFE for Macintoshs in the future. No guarantee that we'll provide a binary of the upcoming 2007.1 release for Mac, but we hope that we can do so.

A little Mac-related progress report :-)

Our new mac programmer provided a patch on the mailing list today that can be already found in SVN now. With this patch applied, FIFE should build on Macintosh again. He also wrote a compile guide if anyone is interested in building FIFE from source:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title...pile_guide

He's currently working on creating universal binaries for Mac. So there seems to be no reason that the 2007.1 release should not feature Mac binaries, stay tuned.

Ahh well, the work on the final fixes for 2007.1 is going extremely slow :-/ Seems like we'll need to delay the release till the end of April, if not even further.

So here is at least a new screenshot of the content that will be featured in the official 2007.1 demo map, stay tuned :-)



The graphics have been taken from Reiner's tilesets:
http://reinerstileset.4players.de/

it looks amazing, cant wait to try it sometime.

unknown Wrote:it looks amazing, cant wait to try it sometime.

Ahh well, I guess you'll need to wait till someone finally starts to work on our damn map editor. We still got no active coder working on it (and about 3-4 inactive ones ).

Creating maps with the text editor is a real PITA but it works for the example map and so I'll go through the hassle till the map is finished.

It's done :-) After over three months of hard work, we've fixed the last issues today and released the 2007.1 milestone of FIFE. The most important improvement is the new custom map format that can be considered as stable. We created a demo map for this release for a number of reasons:
* Show the modders how the FIFE map format and specific concepts like the tilesets, archetypes and prototypes work.
* Set up a starting point for modders so they can get into the world of FIFE more easily.
* Create something that looks totally unFallouty to get away from the "FIFE-is-just-a-Fallout-emulator"-image. Welcome to the Isle of FIFE :-)

Here is a screenshot of our new demo map, using graphics from Reiner's Tilesets:


New features since the 2007.0 release:
* Stable custom XML map format for FIFE including our demo map to show the new features and syntax of it :-)
* FPS limiter (can be set in fife.config) to save important CPU time for future tasks (AI, pathfinding, etc.)
* Tile and object coordinates can be displayed (press "c")
* Color key overriding for Fallout transparency effects (see content/gfx/fallout_overrides.xml)
* Fixed DAT1 decoding code (bug was introduced with the DAT1 rewrite)
* Major map model classes have been exported to Lua and are now accessable via the console
* Map size dependant, configurable geometries
* Colorkeying for the SDL renderer
* Add custom VFS sources via vfs.addSource (see content/etc/vfs_sources.txt)
* Increased startup speed with FO2 DAT files
* Enhanced camera with support for multiple viewports (see content/scripts/demos/map_control.lua)
* Built against SDL_image 1.2.5 and guichan 0.61 now (Win32 binaries)

Get the win32 package here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/FI..._win32.exe

Get the src package for linux, mac and kind of other POSIX systems here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/FI...rc.tar.bz2

Install guide:
1. Unpack
2. Read README.txt

Could anyone here please test if he's able to get the engine compiling using the source package linked above and this guide?
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title...pile_guide

Our Mac programmer is busy and therefore there are no Mac binaries yet :-/

Ahh well, good news from the Mac front I guess :-)

We've got a new Mac developer involved who got time and the required knowledge to create the Mac binaries for FIFE. He has already successfully compiled the latest version of FIFE and currently plans to create an easy to install FIFE package for Macintosh. Therefore we're in the need of Mac testers who would give installing this package a shot and report back if everything works fine. We're in the need of:
* 2-3 testers who're running a PowerPC-based Mac
* 2-3 testers who're running an Intel x86-based Mac

If you're interested, please visit our irc channel to get in contact with one of the developers or reply here. There is no scheduled date when the test packages will be ready but it shouldn't take too long so we thought that it would be good to ask in advance if people are interested in helping out with testing.

The last weeks were quite busy for the majority of the team members so there was we've published no news update since the release of the 2007.1 milestone about 4 weeks ago. Now we've found some time over the weekend to summarize all the events that happened in the last weeks to give you can overview about the current status of the project.

The full article can be found at the developer blog and covers a bunch of topics including some remarks about the feedback concerning the recent release, news about the upcoming universal binaries for Macintosh systems, an update about the SVN and wiki restructuring process and the reintroduced MSVC 2005 and new KDevelop support for FIFE. Have a nice read :-)

Cool!
I keep meaning to try and build this but always forget, shame on me :S

Can't wait to see more of this project

unknown Wrote:Cool!
I keep meaning to try and build this but always forget, shame on me :S

Can't wait to see more of this project

Ahh well, with some luck there are official Mac binaries at the end of the month so you should prolly just wait :-)

Update time :-) Progress was rather slow in the last weeks but there's a bunch of interestings things to report about nevertheless.

So here we go:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/eng...6/25/12.05

Yet another FIFE update coming to you :-)

The work on the extend branch is coming along quite well lately and our current lead programmer Jasoka decided to summarize the current status from the developer's point of view. He does comment on the new Python support of the engine and raises some points how the modularization of FIFE should work.

For everyone who's interested in reading Jasoka's full text, feel free to check it out at our developer blog:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/eng...7/11/18.44

It looks like picking a winner for the send them in contest will be actually quite easy. At the moment there is not a single participant listed there: http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title...tributions

The contest will end at 2007/08/01 and if nobody sends in a package that complies to our rules the jury will consider contributions that don't meet the requirements too. E.g. Wulax did already send in some rather nice looking buildings that can be found within our SVN repository now.

So if you intend to take part in the contest, don't miss the deadline :-)