To bring up the most important fact at the beginning: the FIFE team will finally release the 2007.2 milestone to the public at Wednesday, the 10th of October, 2007. Over five months have passed since the 2007.1 milestone had been released at the end of April and a lot has changed since then. Now that the most important changes are in place and work we feel that it's time for another release to give the community a sign into which direction the project is heading.

Let's summarize the most important changes for the 2007.2 release and have a (small) look into the future of FIFE as well.

After having utilized Lua5 for the scripting side of FIFE for over 18 months we agreed that it would be worth taking a look at SWIG again. SWIG was promising as it offered a way to use our engine with a number of scripting languages; furthermore we could get rid of the semi-manual lunar.h bindings approach this way as well. We ran into some hurdles while trying to integrate SWIG into FIFE but in the end it worked out quite well. Now we had the ability to wrap up the engine into python instead of the old way of embedding the Lua library into FIFE.

The so-called metamodel branch was an undertaking to seriously redesign major parts of the engine. We decided to go for an MVC (model - view - controller) architecture pattern for FIFE and refactored the engine modules accordingly. Another aim was to remove unneeded bi-directional module dependencies to have a clean module hierarchy:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Engine_Core

The Zero-Projekt team agreed to work with the FIFE developers on an example game for future releases together. This way we can give game creators a starting point and show what can be done with the engine. Furthermore working with the Zero team directly together brings up a number of advantages for FIFE:
* We won't need to worry about producing content for the example game.
* We're in contact with game creators so we get feedback what works well and what aspects should be improved.
* We can test and adjust the FIFE API while we work on the example game. This wouldn't be possible without building an actual game on top of the engine.

A first snapshot of the example game will come bundled with the 2007.2 release. Don't expect too much: it is a work in progress project and especially the first versions will naturally lack a lot of polish!

After the release of the 2007.2 milestone we plan to finally start working on the editor tools for FIFE again. We tried to do so several times before but everytime something went wrong: editor programmers disappeared and later we did find several engine issues that prevented building an useful editor tool on top of the engine.

Now that the engine is in pretty good shape after the metamodel refactoring, we feel that working on the editor tools will bring up better results this time. Jwt, who also wrote the new python-based maploaders for the 2007.2 release, does currently investigate how we could create python-based mapsavers. This is meant to be the first step for the editor tools.

Anxs & prock are currently redesigning the FIFE audio module in a separate branch. If everything works out as planned we might be able to ship the new improved audio module already with the 2007.3 release. If you want to read some detailed information about the audio module redesign, head over to the wiki:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Audio_Design_Documentation

Now that we're heading to the finish line we can need every helping hand to test the upcoming release. Furthermore help with packaging would be appreciated as well. Therefore we invite every interested community member to join our project IRC channel to lend us a hand. We hope to see some of you there. If you're too busy, it would be great if you could be around at the release day to celebrate the new milestone with us at least :-)
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=IRC

And finally after all the text, some new eye-candy as well. This is a screenshot of the product we're working on together with the Zero-Projekt team. This content won't ship with the upcoming 2007.2 release and is work in progress.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

We've made it! The 2007.2 release is on the server and we're all happy that it shipped in time.

Download
* Source package (Linux, Macintosh): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/F ... rc.tar.bz2
* Win32 binaries: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/F ... _win32.exe

Screenshot


Important changes since the 2007.1 release
* Removed the rather difficult to maintain lunar.h bindings in favour of SWIG.
* Replaced the Lua scripting support with Python. Now the main loop runs in the scripting language. For the 2007.1 release the main loop still ran in the engine side and the Lua library was embedded into the engine. By utilizing SWIG game creators can add Lua support back to the engine again if they have the need for it.
* Metamodel refactoring. This resulted in a better engine structure and a decreased number of dependencies between the engine modules. Furthermore bi-directional dependencies were removed completely.
* Improved engine modularity. Our aim is that you can cherry-pick specific engine modules of FIFE and just use the ones you really need for your game.
* Pathfinding integration. Exchangable backends so you can already replace the currently rather simple linear pather with a more sophisticated system.
* New 3d geometry system. Camera supports now tilt, rotation and zoom. Geometries are affected by camera adjustments, but in addition to that, layers can contain separate scale and rotation.
* New event channel module. Scripts have full access to mouse, keyboard & widget input.
* New MVC architecture pattern. The whole engine has been refactored to follow a model - view - controller pattern. This leads to a cleaner engine module hierarchy compared to the engine design that was used before.
* Improved action-based animation system.
* A techdemo to give game creators a starting point. This is a common undertaking of the Zero-Projekt team and FIFE.

Read the full release news update:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/en ... 0/10/16.23

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Looks sexy.

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The only difference between genius and psychosis is that society accepts the genius.

Thanks Crypter :-) Any feedback is appreciated so I hope the other forum visitors will find the time to let us know what they think about it as well.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

I keep running across this every now and then in different places. You guys seem very dedicated, which is great. You've also come a very long way. When you finish, or got free time, I'd love to, and I'm sure other developers would, too, read how you tackled certain aspects, difficulties you ran into and their solutions, etc.

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NetGore - Open source online RPG engine

New positions are available! Just updated the thread with all information and new screenshots.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

No fancy new screenshots this time but we updated our compile SDK for Windows systems. You'll need the new SDK to build the latest SVN revisions of FIFE on Win32. Grab the new SDK here:
FIFE Win32 compile SDK sfx 7zip version
FIFE Win32 compile SDK zip version

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

It's update time!

It was pretty quiet in the last weeks. One reason were the number of university tasks but another factor was my personal lazyness and lethargy caused by the holiday period. Now FIFE is back with yet another news update :-)

Here is a nifty new screenshot of the currently work in progress editor tool:


Furthermore our latest blog post covers the latest issues we encountered but also progress reports from the audio module, editor development and pather front.

You can check out the whole news update at the FIFE developer blog:
Time for heroes - yet another FIFE blog update

Last but not least: we're of course still trying to recruit new developers for the project :-) Don't be shy and visit us at our developer IRC channel.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Pretty interesting project, I must say. If you ever release an editor for your engine, I have a feeling that it will become very, very popular. I'm just curious, could you decribe to me briefly how you implemented the scene management in the engine?

Good luck

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2d engine | 8-bit commando | chains

The editor tool is already in the works :-) Though still far from being feature-complete.

About the scene management question: I thought that the term "scene management" would just apply to real 3d engines. I would need to talk to the developer who knows the view code best and ask him about the details. Do you got any specific questions about the scene management?

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Definetly looks nice! Keep it up

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Serious game developer

http://www.persistentrealities.com
http://www.persistentrealities.com/vbfibre
http://www.ambiances.nl

It's update time again :-) three weeks have passed since our last official blog update and we're glad that we can report to have made several steps forward in this time.

To just summarize the most important points:
- We decided to revive the island_demo concept from the 2007.1 release and ship a island_demo like game with future FIFE releases
- View code changes to improve performance and resolve z-order issues
- Floating text renderer support for map instances
- VFS improvements for editor tool
- Vastly improved pychan extension
- FIFE documentation server with fresh doxygen, epydoc documentation generated on a daily basis; live IRC logs for developers
- Tweaked FIFE forums design
- Fresh blood on the team: two new programmers, one additional project manager
- New precompiled Win32 SVN snapshot available

Feel free to give the whole detailed blog update a read here:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/en ... 1/28/17.22

In case you're just interested in fancy screenshots we got something for you as well. Here is a list of all new screenshots that are shown in the update:
Floating text support:


Continuum graphics pack: 45° rotation:


Continuum graphics pack: 135° rotation:


Continuum graphics pack: 225° rotation:


Continuum graphics pack: 315° rotation:


Continuum graphics pack: playing around with rotation, tilt and zoom parameters:


Last but not least: here is the download link for the mentioned new SVN snapshot for Win32:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/F ... _win32.exe

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

We've done it again! We proudly present the FIFE 2008.0 release :-)

Download:
* Source package (FreeBSD, Linux, Macintosh)
* Win32 binaries

Screenshot of the new editor tool:


Youtube promotion trailer:
FIFE 2008.0 promo video

Theme of this release:
For the 2008.0 release we decided to pick up the island_demo concept again. Right: again. We already used this concept for the 2007.1 release but we put it on ice as we worked together with the Zero-Projekt developers on a different example game for the 2007.2 release. The cooperation didn't work out as planned for either side and so both teams stick to their own projects again now.

After the cooperation has ended we considered all possible options and finally decided to flesh out the old island_demo concept and base our future example game upon it. Although we were able to finish the initial planning work for the new island_demo game some days ago, there is almost none of the new planned content in place yet. On the other side the engine itself and the editor tool that ships with it now made _huge_ steps forward since the last release about 4 months ago. Therefore we decided to release the current status as stable release although it offers not many new aspects on the content side and the content that is in place is very likely to change with the 2008.1 release.

The milestone itself seems to be a very important step into the right direction. You can build your own maps now with the help of the editor tool. Furthermore a basic application structure is in place that should give you an idea how can create your own FIFE-based game. We'll surely adjust the structure of the island_demo client over the next months but this release is stable enough to start working on your game now.

This release is surely not the beginning of the end of the road for us, but it's the end of beginning for the FIFE development team. Enjoy it as we do :-)

Important changes since the 2007.2 release:
* New audio module with support for some more advanced audio features.
* Optimized view code to improve the performance and resolve map instance z-order issues.
* Switched back to island_demo concept; this will be the example game that ships with future FIFE releases as well.
* Ability to save maps
* Routing pathfinding (previous release only had linear pather)
* Pluggable rendering system with several new plugins included.
* New editor tool, which can be used to layout maps
* XML-format improvements: stack position, z-position, camera definitions, animation x/y offsets
* Vastly improved pychan extension; XML based GUI definitions
* Quadtree adjustments
* Ability to define own settings formats and interpret them from scripts
* Ability to attach cameras to instances (so that they are tracked while they move)
* Separate x/y scaling for cellgrids, allows more flexible geometry definitions (e.g. rectangle)
* Basic mouse map instance picking.
* Improved engine-script exception reporting
* Mouse cursors can be changed from scripts

Few non-code related changes:
* Rough task list for the whole island demo has now been created
* Vastly improved documentation with nightly updates for engine core & scripts
* Lots of new content gathered and created for island demo e.g. agent definitions, clouds graphics, music...

Read the full release announcement at the FIFE developer blog.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

The FIFE team released a new version of their compile SDK for win32 systems today.

The new SDK addresses an issue with MSVC2005 debug builds that was just recently discovered. Furthermore libSDL and SWIG have been upgraded to the latest versions.

Read the full announcement at the FIFE development blog:
New compile SDK for win32 release announcement

Download URL:
* FIFE 2008.0 win32 compile SDK (selfextracting 7zip version)
* FIFE 2008.0 win32 compile SDK (zip version)

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

It's time for yet another FIFE update :-)

This time we got something special for you: a new series entitled "FIFE community spotlight". The idea behind these new community spotlight articles is to have a closer look at the projects which are utilizing FIFE for their games. The first community spotlight covers the computer roleplaying game project "Zero" that is currently in development.

You can read about it at the FIFE blog:
FIFE community spotlight #1: Zero - a postnuclear cRPG

Here is some eye candy from Zero to convince you to actually read the whole community spotlight article:






Last but not least and slightly related to the community spotlight series: we did recently declutter our wiki starting page. Check out the new and hopefully improved version here:
FIFE wiki

All kind of feedback concerning the community spotlight and the new wiki starting page is appreciated by the team :-)

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Just a short update :-) a first SVN snapshot of the upcoming 2008.1 release is availabe for win32 systems.

Download URL:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/F ... _win32.exe

Important changes since the 2008.0 release:
- Instance outlining
- Real stepless zoom for OpenGL render backend
- Curing singletonitis by getting rid of audio manager & vfs singleton via refactoring
- New music by the new composer torrent71

Unpack to HDD and read the README.txt that resides in the root directory.

Screenshots of new features that ship with this release:
Improved editor tool:


Instance highlighting:


Zoomed in:


Zoomed out:

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Welcome to yet another FIFE news update.

A lot of topics to cover and just few time on my hands so I'll just list everything and you decide if it's worth reading :-)
* New project manager on the team and first blog update by him
* New composer on the team and first music tracks available
* Experimental networking branch (woohoo! multiplayer FIFE)
* Experimental MSVC2008 build system support
* Physfs branch
* New context menu
* A new name for FIFE?
* First Zero-Projekt video released

In case one of these topics sounds worth checking out, head over to our developer blog:
* Blog update: the smell of spring
* Blog update: Panic

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Howdy and welcome to yet another FIFE news update :-)

This time we cover our ongoing efforts to release the next FIFE milestone under a less restrictive license compared to the current GPL licensing. This topic seems to be especially interesting for independent developers who consider to use FIFE for a game project but are afraid of the current licensing policy.

You can read the whole news update at the developer blog:
License mumbo jumbo at the FIFE blog

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE update :-)

Unfortunately this one contains somewhat bad news as the majority of our key developers have been quite busy lately. Now I'm facing some serious university issues so I'll need to take a temporaty break from the project as well.

We appreciate all kind of help by new interested developers. We know that there are more tempting tasks than applying for a development team that is currently going through a drying time. But we wanted to be always up front about the status of the project so that's we think it's our duty to inform the community about lack of progress and issues as well.

You can read the whole update at the FIFE developer blog:
Temporary drying time for the FIFE project

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

There are two important things to talk about so we decided to post a little developer blog update to keep the community up to date about the current status of the project.

FIFE is still progressing rather slow because of the lack of active developers who can invest time into the project. If you think you could help, please don't don't hesitate to grab the latest code from SVN to have a look into it and get in contact with us after that.

We recently released an upgraded compile SDK for win32 systems. You can read about all of this in detail at the FIFE developer blog:
http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/en ... 5/29/18.38

Enjoy the good weather outside and remember that you don't need a weathermen to know which way the wind blows.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment