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.

• 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.

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.

Project management department

As already mentioned in the introduction: most of us had to take a break from the project in December and over the holidays to spend some time with the family and to recharge our batteries. The original plan was to post this update some time after Christmas, but seeing that most of us were still on a break, I’ve postponed this news update until today. The plan is to shoot everyone on the team a short email, hoping that a bunch of devs will be back in action over the course of the next week.

We’ll give you a more accurate picture of our resources in the next news update; right now we don’t really know who can invest time into PARPG in early 2010 to finish our first techdemo release.

Audio department

We reported about Sindwiller’s contributions in the audio department in our last update in December and while most of us have been enjoying the break from the project, Sindwiller has continueed to work on his audio track in the meanwhile. The current version is still work in progress but the volume level has been normalized and a couple of other details have been tweaked, so feel free to check it out: Snow may never end – work in progress audio track by Sindwiller

Programming department

Altough our own programming department has been rather busy due the holidays, there are some exciting news to report nevertheless. First and foremost: the FIFE team plans to ship a new stable release after there hasn’t been such a release in one and a half years! Stay tuned for FIFE 0.3.0 and let’s hope that they can manage to finish the work on it until the scheduled 2010/01/20 release date.

We at PARPG have been always using the latest SVN version of FIFE so the lack of new official releases did not really affect us. But if you would have to compile a complete list of changes and improvements over the last 2008.1 release, you might need to invest a couple of days to not miss anything. So that’s a huge step for the FIFE team and we keep our fingers crossed that FIFE development will flourish over the course of the next months and years. A release date announcement can be found at the FIFE blog: FIFE 0.3.0 release date annoucement

We do keep our fingers even more crossed that one specific improvement makes it into this 0.3.0 release. As mentioned in our last PARPG news update: we’ve encountered performance issues that showed up when you used FIFE in combination with very large maps due the huge number of map instances. The underlying problem has been identified by a number of developers, including PARPG programmer amo-ej1, so FIFE guru phoku decided to look into rewriting FIFE’s view code.

Although the rewritten code does already reside in a branch in FIFE’s SVN repository, it has not been merged back into the FIFE trunk yet. There are still a number of smaller problems, but they can be hopefully fixed soon so every FIFE-based project can profit from the vastly improved performance of the new code. We’ve tested it on a number of system ourselves and encountered improved performance up to 400% (read: yes, that’s four times as fast as before) on some systems in combination with our profiling map. If you’re interested in the details and/or would like to test the branch yourself, head over to our forums and check out this thread: testing the view_performance branch with PARPG

Writing department

While most of us enjoyed their free time, zenbitz continueed to work on the ingame dialog scripts. Feel free to test the latest version of them yourself!

Graphics department

In case you wondered about the title of the news update and what the heck it is supposed to mean. Well, we saved the best for last So here we go, a whole bunch of new portraits, created by our concept artists. Most of them have been drawn by Gaspard, with the exception of the Ula portrait, which has been created by JustinOperable. Enjoy them

Camilla

Synnove

Hoadir, the husky

Kimmo

Jacob

Ula

Character pinups

There are actually even more new and refined portraits at our wiki gallery. E.g. an updated version of the female guard shown before or Dig, the bouncer, created by comscar. Feel free to check them all out.

That’s all concerning PARPG for today.

Last but not least: the fine folks at Iron Tower Studios released a first combat demo of their upcoming post apoc ancient Rome indie RPG Age of Decadence. Their persistence in continuing to create a game against a lot of odds and especially their fair, open and transparent way of community interaction has always been a great source of inspiration to me and without their example, PARPG might not have been founded at all. So to give credit where credit is due, check out their combat demo and feel free to head over to their forums to provide feedback. They actually care about it

Next news update scheduled for Monday, 18th of January. See you then.

Happy holidays from the FIFE team!

We plan on merging his changes into trunk when it has been fully tested and before we release FIFE 0.3.0. We ask that everyone give the view_performance branch a try and report your experiences and any bugs you find at this post on the forms so we can accomplish this.  Your help is greatly appreciated!

Project management department

The first and the prolly most important news is that it turned out that releasing our first techdemo of PARPG won’t happen in 2009. We’re still working hard to ship it in early 2010 (hopefully between late January and early March), but there is simply too much planned content missing at this point to ship it this year. We’re sorry that it will take longer than originally planned but you still got the option to check out what we already have in place by testing the SVN version of PARPG.

One aspect of game development which gave us a lot of headaches are licensing issues. For the code it’s rather simple: we’ll publish all Python scripts under GPL 3.0. However for the non-code assets, things are more tricky. I don’t have the time to go into too many details but one of the main problems is that it’s often hard to find good textures licensed under terms that permit commercial distribution as well. To address this problem Q_x created a list of asset websites that have published their material under terms which are compatible with our chosen CC 3.0 BY-SA license.

In reality it’s actually way more complicated because a lot of asset websites actually do not permit that their textures are sold or redistributed at other texture websites. But as soon as you actually apply the texture to a model and render it, the resulting render is not affected by these NC and restrictive redistribution clauses according to their license. My gut feeling tells me that the resulting renders are actually derivative works as they’re based on the textures and should therefore be infected by the NC and restricted redistribution clauses but I guess it’s okay to sell and redistribute the renders nevertheless as their license seems to permit that.

Hopefully we can ship the entire techdemo 1 content under CC 3.0 BY-SA terms. That just means the actual content that is used in the game. We might need to ship the source versions (e.g. models and textures) of the techdemo content under different licenses, especially whenever NC textures were used. It should hopefully not affect distribution of the PARPG game, just the distribution of our media assets sources library. The only conclusion I have right now is that licenses are simply a huge can of worms. Having to worry about all these aspects takes away a lot of the fun that game development is. It’s necessary nevertheless and we’ll come up with a solid solution for techdemo 1.

Audio department

Finally some news from the audio front again. Open source enthusiast Sindwiller posted a work in progress version of a track he’s currently working on at the forums. Feel free to check it out and provide feedback. We can hopefully feature the final version of it in our first techdemo release.

Programming department

We finally started to restructure the objects directory to get rid of the rather ugly and confusing objects/objects directory. Objects/objects has been split up into objects/items (smaller objects that characters can actually pick up) and objects/scenery. If you’re interested in the details, head over to our forums.

Win32 developer Kaydeth looked into creating a first test version of the upcoming Win32 PARPG techdemo installer. We’re using NSIS for this purpose and so far things look good. There are still some tweaks to be made, e.g. offering users the choice to install ActivePython 2.6 as well as PyYaml; furthermore we’re still having some problems with Vista / Win7 UAC but we’re positive that we can fix them before we ship a release. If you want to test Kaydeth’s test installer, check out this thread at the forums.

We’ve been experimenting with map sizes for the techdemo lately and ran into a performance bottleneck that shows up if you have a map with many (> 20000) map instances. It turned out that FIFE’s view code is not that well optimized in this regard. PARPG developer amo-ej1 profiled the issue and reported back about his findings at the forums. Furthermore he also documented the necessary steps to profile PARPG at our wiki. The FIFE devs plan to have a look into the problem in their 0.3.2 release. This release is planned for mid 2010. So for now, we’ll simply go for maps that feature less than 20k instances and we should be pretty much on the save side performance-wise.

Writing department

A little news flash from our writing department: Zenbitz did recently flesh out the inn area of the techdemo including the denizens of this location. He has been rather hardworking on the dialogues of several techdemo characters as well and commited their scripts into SVN over the course of the last weeks. You can talk to several characters now, so feel free to check it out yourself by giving the SVN version of PARPG a shot.

Graphics department

This news update is not as image-heavy as some of the ones before. Our graphics artists have been quite busy as Christmas is nearing. Nevertheless 3d artist Sirren found the time to create several pieces of furniture, including beds.

He furthermore also created a gate that’s part of the outer boundary of the techdemo area. Python programmer Or1andov implemented alpha blending for the gate (and other objects that reside on a layer above the characters) so your view is not blocked while walking around under specific map instances. I actually had to split up the pillars of the gate into several 70px wide pieces to work around z-ordering issues. Fortunately Zenbitz ported amo-ej1’s image slicing script to PIL (the Python Imaging Library). The original version of the image slicing script was utilizing PythonMagick. And as PythonMagick has to be built from source and the build process is quite complicated, there was no easy way to get the script working on non-*NIX systems. Fortunately that’s not the case anymore with the PIL version.

In case you’re interested in all the details of the process of getting the gate into the game, check out this thread at the forums. All the other are surely happy to see a screenshot at least:

One last note: I recently had the time to bring some assets, that had been lying around in Trac but hadn’t been commited into the repository yet, into SVN. In case you want to check them out, head over to the media part of the SVN trunk.

Now one last personal remark from my side. Unfortunately a lot of university-related tasks have been piling up over the course of the last weeks. I’m simply not good at multitasking so for now I have to take a break until the Christmas holidays to finally finish two still outstanding papers. Don’t worry, I’ll be be back to bring you the next (short) news update some time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Stay tuned!

Just a short note about the Code::Blocks build issues that showed up on Win32 when using an SVN snapshot of the Code::Blocks IDE. It seems that the problems were rather caused by Code::Blocks itself and were unrelated to FIFE.

If you still have problems building FIFE via Code::Blocks on Win32, follow these steps:

• Install the November 2009 Win32 DevKit for FIFE
• Grab the Code::Blocks SVN snapshot r5911
• Get the newest MinGW package from tdragon.net and install it into the mingw folder of Code::Blocks!

If you still got problems with building FIFE from SVN sources via Code::Blocks, add a comment to this trac ticket. Happy hacking!