mvBarracuda

What is PARPG?: PARPG is the working title of an isometric open source roleplaying game based on a post-apocalyptic setting. The project is currently still in its early planning stages. It will be a hommage to the golden age of RPGs of the late 90's and early postmillenium years. Main source of inspiration will be the Fallout series but also other classics of the genre, e.g. Arcanum and Planescape: Torment. There are no fancy screenshots in this announcement so in case you're just looking for the eyecandy don't be disappointed: there is none at this stage of development. The vapourware trap: You've seen such announcements prolly over a dozen times before and the vast majority of them might have turned out as vapourware in the long run. There is no guarantee that PARPG might not suffer from the same tragic issues however I'm trying to explain why this project has a better chance of succeeding than some others that you've seen in the past. My main source of confidence is my prior experience in the field of open source development. I was one of the founders of the open source game engine project FIFE and worked on the project over the course of three full years from 2005-2008. While working on FIFE I learnt a fair share about project management in general; but also about public relations, developer recruitment, maintenance of development-related infrastructure (SVN, Trac, Wiki) and software engineering in particular. This development background will hopefully help the PARPG project to succeed in the long run. I know that it's impossible to remove doubts about the future development of the project at this moment. Some might still know me from my involvement in FIFE and I can hopefully convince the ones who don't know me yet with solid progress over the course of the next months. Technical framework: There is no final decision about all details of the technical framework of PARPG yet. What can be said is that the majority of the game-related code will be written in Python. Python - the 2.5x brach of it for now - was chosen as it features an easy to adopt clean syntax (yes, we are aware of the whitespace complaints), comes with a large standard library and seems to be well suited for easy and fast prototyping of game concepts. We might need to mix in some C or C++ in case time-critical code turns out to be too slow in Python. The most important decision besides the programming language of choice is the question which engine to use for PARPG. FIFE might be well-suited for the task, however I'm not a programmer so I won't try to enforce any decision in this direction. One of the key principles of the project is subsidiarity: leave the important decisions to the departments that understand them. Therefore we'll sit together with interested programmers later to see what kind of choices we have (FIFE, GemRB, custom engine based on libraries like pyglet, etc.) and decide about it once we feel like having a clearer picture of what we want to achieve and what kind of technical framework would be needed for this purpose. Setting, gameplay, key design elements: The game is to be set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout. Key elements include: * Cold war in the past ending with an atomic war with no winners. * Collapse of society as we know it. * Hardship to survive in a radiated environment, between bands of highway men, mutants and other deviant forces. * Irony and parody of the cold war and the retro 50's vision of the future. The exact setting is yet to be defined. There are numerous interesting locations to be picked. The game could be set in a snow-covered world, or in a more temperate climate or perhaps in a desert as the original Fallout. It could include successors to the remains of the Soviet Union (ever wondered how soviet vaults would look like?), remains of other allied nations or anything else, interesting enough to fit this setting. The final decision would be on a community of skilled people with imagination, in which great ideas would hopefully evolve. Gameplay is planned to be a combination of meaningful, well-written dialogue and turn-based combat. The player would have multiple progress paths through the game and not all would include combat. The combat itself would be turn-based and include various tactics to overcome your foes. Everything else besides that is up to the people who are attracted by the points outlined above, have experience in the relevant fields and would like to get involved in PARPG development. A compiled list of key design elements as well as important remarks about the project philosophy can be found at the PARPG wiki. What is done: So what is done so far? A couple of things: I've set up the basic infrastructure for the project (blog, forums, SVN, Trac, wiki) and I've started to outline the concept at the wiki. I might need three additional weeks to flesh out the remaining details that are currently flying around in my head but haven't been written down yet. Once these steps are tackled, I'll start to try to recruit developers for the other development departments: writing, gameplay, programming and graphics. Audio / music is not a top priority at the moment so we could get started without any developer in this field though having a composer or an audio engineer on the team is surely a nice plus. What's still left to take care of: A couple of things are unfinished business at the moment. I'm still waiting for a final decision from sourceforge if my hosting plea gets accepted. Hopefully they'll get back to me in the next couple of days. Furthermore there are a bunch of wiki articles left to flesh out. I'm not totally sure what kind of essential information is still missing before actual recruitment can start but that's why decided to announce the project at this early stage of development. The purpose of this announcement: I'm posting this announcement on a couple of forums where I'm either actively contributing or at least lurking on a regular basis. Hopefully there are community members out there who would like to provide early feedback. The best part of it is that there is still a lot of things to decide so your informed opinion can make a real difference. Feel free to sign up at the forums, take a peek into the project wiki, visit the development blog or simply join the project's IRC channel. All kind of early feedback concerning the game (development) concept outlined at the project wiki is really appreciated. Contributions: Last but not least one final word about contributions: the project is still in its planning phase. That means I'm still busy writing down my ideas to convince other developers to join the effort. Once concepts are properly outlined - which will be hopefully around the end of February - official recruitment can start. The contribution policy is: power to the people who understand what they're doing and who don't mind spending some time on doing so. That means that although all kind of feedback is appreciated and will be taken into account, decision making will happen among the developers of the revelant department who invested their time into the project. We prefer the rule of decisions based on informed discussion over the rule of decisions by simple majority vote. If you would like to know more about the next steps of PARPG development beyond the developers recruitment phase, feel free to check out the roadmap article at the wiki. Furthermore we recently compiled some first guidelines for interested contributors.

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE news update ) When I decided to step back from my position as project manager of FIFE so I could focus on my studies and private life back in September last year, I was hoping to find a new developer who would overtake my tasks and act as new project manager of FIFE. Unfortunately there were no long waiting queues of volunteers who would have liked to jump into this effort right away. On the other side I didn't invest much time and effort into finding a replacement for me as I was preparing for my final Latin exams back then. So now that that I got some spare free time on my hands, I'll tell you how you can contribute to the future of the FIFE project. LinuxDonald, the former project manager of the FIFE-based OpenAnno project, recently got in contact with me and volunteered for taking over the project management duties of FIFE. I was quite happy that he's interested in this position as that's a good chance to resume the development of the project, that is currently on halt. The idea to create a cross platform open source isometric 2d game engine is one that I still believe in; it's just that I lack the time and motivation to continue supporting this project by being responsible for a vast number of tasks. Therefore I would like to help handing over the project to an active development team as much as possible. You want to know, what the fuzz is about all about? Read the full news at the FIFE developer blog.

Looks like I can't edit my previous posting for some reason :-/ The URL to the high quality version of the video was screwed up because case sensitiveness tricked me ( Here is the correct URL: http://openanno.org/upload/openanno-2008.1-demo.mkv

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE news update! This time we got quite some important news to announce: the FIFE-based real-time economy simulation and strategy game OpenAnno released its first public milestone recently. The primary purpose of this release is to show the framework in action and to attract some new interested developers for the OpenAnno project this way. Although there is rudimentary gameplay available, don't expect something too sophisticated our you'll end up disappointed. Their release comes in three flavours: precompiled binaries for 32 & 64bit Linux distros and a win32 installer: * OpenAnno 2008.1 release download site For the ones who want to get a first impression before downloading the release, there are screenshots and an official release trailer for your viewing pleasure ) Screenshot: Release trailer: * Low quality youtube version. * High quality MKV version (H.264 + Ogg Vorbis >> Matroska container). Read the full blog posting at the FIFE developer blog )

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE update! This time we got a whole pack of news for you today: - Linux OpenGL bug that was worrying us for over a year finally fixed by OpenAnno developer! - Rewrite of the rendering pipeline planned to improve performance and add the possibility of more advanced graphical features. - FIFE becomes the Flexible Isometric Free Engine. - 3 years of FIFE IRC birthday party at 2008/09/11. - Departure of a founding developer. Who will it be? You can read about it at the FIFE developer blog.

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE update ) This time we'll cover the ongoing name change process of the project. We asked the community to send in proposals for a new name and new meanings for the FIFE acronym to underline that we've moved away from our Fallout roots. Now that the proposals have been sent in, we've opened a poll and every user who's registered at the forums got over three weeks to vote for two of the choices. Furthermore our artist Lamoot started working on two new tutorials that should help FIFE users to create nice-looking isometric graphics. The birthday of the FIFE project is nearing as well; just one month left until FIFE turns three! Last but not least we ask the community to lend us a hand to track down a bug that affects a rather huge number of Linux users. In case you running Linux and ATI hardware don't hesitate to get in contact with us! You can read about the details at the FIFE developer blog.

I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of acronyms out there that mean something something similar in some language ) Simply pronounce it as the English number 5, that's at least how I do it. To be fair: OpenAnno is still in an early stage of development and I'm absolutely sure that we'll see improvements in the field of graphics. Just give them some time ) I wanted to give the project a little news coverage but I should have added a paragraph about the current status of it. On the other side: these pictures show that there is still quite some room for improvement so if you think you can do better, consider to get involved in the project.

Welcome to yet another FIFE update! This time we're proud to bring the second issue of the community spotlight series to you. In this episode we cover the progress (or the lack of it) of the current FIFE-based projects in general but also the development of the OpenAnno project in detail. OpenAnno is a free and open source realtime economy simulation with strategy elements loosely oriented towards Sunflower's Anno series. You can read the full community spotlight article at the FIFE developer blog. Here is a little visual teaser for those who would like to get a first impression of OpenAnno before deciding if it's worth to dive into the mass of text. More screenshots can be found in the full article that is linked above.

It's time for a little FIFE update again ) We're currently considering to change the name of the project or to choose at least a new meaning for the FIFE acronym to express that we've moved away from our initial Fallout roots. The engine is simply neither limited to Fallout-like games in particular nor to RPGs in general anymore. We would like to hear what the community thinks about it. You got two weeks to bring up proposals for new names or new meanings for the FIFE acronym at our forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=93.0 After that we'll open a poll and all registered forums' users can vote for two choices from the list of all proposals. The poll will stay open for four weeks; after that the developers will try to agree on one name from the top 3 of the poll. You can read about our plans in details at the developer blog: http://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/engin...008/07/19/21.53 A little screenshot from work in progress FIFE-based game OpenAnno: I plan to cover OpenAnno in the second episode of the FIFE community spotlight series soon. Stay tuned ) Last but not least: Urban Breznik, a friend of our team member Lamoot, was so kind to provide us with a draft for a new FIFE logo. We're interested in all kind of feedback concerning the draft. If the community thinks it suits the project we'll introduce it as new official FIFE logo after we decided on a new name (text can be adjusted; the cube itself would stay regardless of a possible name change). Discussion concerning the logo takes place at the forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=86.msg873#msg873 That's it from our side for today ) see you at the next update.

We've done it again! We proudly present the FIFE 2008.1 release ) Download: Source package (FreeBSD, Linux, Macintosh) Win32 binaries For the 2008.1 release we decided to stick to the tropical island concept and called our example game "Rio de hola". Caution: this release is still lacking a lot of polish, especially the "Rio de hola" game that ships with it. It lacks almost any form of gameplay but there is a reason why we decided to ship the release in its current form nevertheless. We planned to release future FIFE milestones under the LGPL to offer a less "restrictive" license to possible FIFE users (we know that the term "restrictive" is just our personal point of view). We had to clear up the legal situation first and fortunately the software freedom law center helped us with the transition. The agreement of all developers who contributed code that was still used in FIFE was needed and because over three dozens of people contributed code to the project, this took us a lot of time. We were not able to reach all of them so we decided to either remove or rewrite the code of the contributors who didn't reply to our license switch proposal mails (from scratch). We were able to replace the last parts of the problematic code today so now FIFE is officially LGPL'ed software. We're glad that we were able to make this step after it took us so long and we think that the new license alone is worth a release. Therefore we're proud to finally present the first FIFE release that is published under LGPL 2.1 or newer (your choice). Engine and the editor tool made _huge_ steps forward since the last release about 5 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 2008.2 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; this release is stable enough to start working on your game now ) Most important changes since the 2008.0 release: * License switch from GPL 2.0 to LGPL 2.1 or newer. * Improved map format & resource loading (datasets branch). * Vastly improved editor tool; batch object loading. * New (work in progress) Rio de hola demo: new maps, graphics, sounds (still unfinished!). * Eye candy: stepless zoom (OpenGL mode only), instance coloring & outlining. Screenshots & videos: Just two somewhat representative release screenshots. Rio de hola: Editor tool: No videos from our side this time. You might see a video presentation of the new FIFE release soon nevertheless as the FreeGamer blog considers to cover the release with a short video soon. No final decision made yet but if it they actually create a video of this FIFE release, we'll let you know here ) Read the full release announcement at the FIFE developer blog.

Finally some time on my hands again so here is a roundhouse kick reply! Hehe, never played Darklands ( I had an AMIGA 500 back in this time and bought a PC some years later. Missed it somehow. Concerning my Latin studies: I've worked out a basic plan and I can invest at least some time into FIFE again (approx. 5-7 hours a week) so we're currently trying to get things running again. Some new programmers are already interested in getting involved but let's wait and see if they stick to it. We're using C++ & Python. The C++ engine core gets built as dynamic library and we wrap it into Python with the help of SWIG so the main loop runs in script side (python). As you have prior python experience, feel free to check out our code from SVN. The project started as an improved Fallout-like game engine but we've moved away from these roots over the last two years. Now FIFE is more and more becoming a full featured 2.5d game engine that supports all kind of isometric and similar pseudo 3d views. To be fair: we refactored the code over the last months and more and more singletons have been removed. The only remaining singleton that I'm aware of is the logging module one but we didn't find a satisfying way to get rid of it. We appreciate every hint if / how we could refactor this part of the engine as well. Seconded ) That's a quite complex topic so it would be useful to have some kind of list of aspects that you would be interested in. In general FIFE seems to go down the route of becoming an independent 2.5d game engine that is not tied to any specific game type. GemRB seems to be geared towards RPGs and although their aim seems to be that some new games get made with the engine, it seems to be still somewhat IE-specific. 'though I need to admit that I haven't had a look into their code for over a year so take this with a grain of salt. If you got questions about any specific engine aspect and how it compares to GemRB let me know and I'll try to find some time to investigate it and reply here as soon as I got some free time on my hands.

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/engin...008/05/29/18.38 Enjoy the good weather outside and remember that you don't need a weathermen to know which way the wind blows.

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

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

Yep thanks for the pointer Musopticon? ) The youtube version can be found here: HQ version (40mb): http://zero-projekt.net/files/video/Dev_Showreel-2008_0.avi

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

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/FIFE...r2282_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:

Hopefully we can bring this thread a bit back on track with this on-topic update ) 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 )

Please elaborate ) As expressed: I seriously believe that FIFE will be a great option for hobbyist and independent developers. This engine is not meant for modern AAA titles; I do completely agree that this engine will never be featured in a mass market game. Let me ask a simple a question: if you would be an independent or hobbyist developer why would you create your own engine from scratch and invest a lot of time into it if there would be a free (as in free beer and in free speech) solution that suits your needs? What major drawback do you see that stops the mentioned target audience from adopting FIFE? Because writing a good engine takes a lot of time, prolly around two years if you start from scratch. So why would somebody who just wants to create a game spend two years trying to write something that is already available for free and can be customized to suit his / her needs? It's not about being a 2d or 3d fanatic. My point is that it's easier for hobbyist and indepentent developers to use a 2d engine in bunch of cases than to go for full-featured 3d. There are also some problems associated to the new possibilites that 3d engines introduced. In case you add a first version view to your game you will adjust the gameplay to work from the first person perspective as well. E.g. Party-based RPGs work far better in isometric perspective than in first person view. The graphical restrictions of a 2d engine seem to help the developer to focus on the IMO most important element of game design: to come up with solid and enjoyable gameplay. Recent RPGs like Oblivion went more and more into the direction of first person shooter gameplay: shiny graphics but lacking a lot of soul. I want complex dialogues like in Planescape Torment, I want real choices with real outcomes like in Fallout, I want a party of adventurers who are going along with me like in Arcanum. I couldn't care less about shiny bloom or "immersion" of a real 3d world I can see with my own eyes in first person view. I wouldn't mind a 3d remake of Planescape Torment. But Planescape would NOT work in first person view; Planescape featured strong party-based gameplay so it's essential IMO that a remake would just feature isometric perspective. As soon as you introduce first person view you start to make gameplay compromises. E.g. turn-based combat as featured in Fallout doesn't work really well in first person view, so let's make it a real-time button mash fest. Time will tell ) I don't mind a graphical step backwards if it helps to focus on bringing the gameplay some steps forward. If we need to go back to the graphics standards of 1999 to see some new games with excellent gameplay as the ones from the golden age of RPGs I'm fine with that.

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)

I wouldn't call it "solid 10 year old technology". Especially for independent developers modern 2d engines can be a good option for their games. Concerning your "why?" question: I think that for the majority of the people who work on FIFE the motivation is twofold: On one side there is the motivation to work on something that could help to bring back the games that you would like to play yourself. Quite many modern RPGs seem to suffer from the problem that they're targeted towards a more and more increasing audience. Usually developers try to attract younger gamers who often spend more of their pocket money on games than adults do. This is also related to the shift of development focus from PC to console games. There are fewer quality RPGs for PC and the ones that are in production are often cross platform (read: developed for modern consoles and PC) projects. Oblivion was a fine example of what I would call the downfall of mature RPGs for PCs. A lot of aspects where simplified compared to Morrowind and the game appeared as a console to PC port in some aspect (e.g. the poor, very large user interface so the XBox users can read the fonts while sitting 3m away from the TV). My personal hope is that FIFE gets adopted by indie developers who would like to create RPGs in the spirit of Fallout, Planescape Torment or Arcanum. While these games didn't feature top notch graphics, I enjoyed them far more than any of the mass market RPGs that were released in the last several years (Vampire: Bloodlines by the new defuct Troika might be the only exception to this rule). On the other side there is some personal motivation involved for every developer who works on FIFE. By working on such a project you learn a lot about how to create games, work in a team, communicate with other individuals, discuss concepts with them. Basically working on FIFE helped to build up my soft skills in a lot of areas and learn how to work in a team with people from all over the world. So spending all the time on the project might help me to get a job once I finished university )

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: 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.

Is there no way to edit the last post? I tried to find the EDIT button for about five minutes but failed :grin:/ The download link for the new SVN snapshot has changed, the new URL is: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/FIFE_r2057_win32.exe In case I missed the EDIT link, could a moderator please edit the post above with the new link and delete this post? Thanks )

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/engin...008/01/28/17.22 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

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.