Until next time…

This release was focused mainly on taking care of some pesky bugs. Unfortunately we were unable to fix all the bugs we wanted to because of some issues with one of our dependencies (namely guichan and it’s event system).  For the most part we took care of everything we set out to fix.

Some of the changes of note for 0.3.1 include:

• Added color key support
• You can now add event listeners to the front of the listener list
• The VFS no longer transforms all filenames to lowercase
• A few build system fixes
• OpenBSD support
• Many Editor fixes

For a full list of changes please visit the 0.3.1  change log.

To download the new version of FIFE please visit our download page on the Wiki.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this release a possibility.  We hope to continue to provide you with regular releases of FIFE to help make developing a game with FIFE a lot easier to manage.

Enjoy!

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!