Projects

Updates on the Nightly Builds

My SFML Nightly Builds were quite a few commits behind last week, mainly because I wanted to keep the matching SFML version for Thor and thought I could get the automated building system to work with Thor. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do so in time and thus I only update the latest version section and left the previous section with the older version. Now that GCC 4.8 got released this week, I’m thinking about providing binaries for yet another compiler, but I’m not sure which one I should use. What do you guys think?

Kroniax 5.2, Preview & Source Code

AlexAUT is not resting and keeps polishing his game Kronaix. We’re not at version 5.2, which brought a working Challenge Mode with online highscore and fixed different bugs. He also moved the updates to Indie DB and thus might get some more people to play Korniax.

I’ve posted the last weeks LP not only here, but also on the forum thread and AlexAUT asked me, if he could use my LP as a Preview. I gave him of course the permission, but also offered to create a ‘stand-alone’ preview, which he was even more excited about.

Besides the new official release and the preview, AlexAUT finally published the source to GitHub and with 5 pull requests, he already got some contributions from Haze, iostream and me. Haze made sure, that the source code will compile on Linux, iostream made a conforming Markdown ReadMe and I’ve mainly cleaned up the file naming and structure and added a CMake build system. Feel free to check it out and contribute to it.

Kroniax on GitHub

Open Hexagon’s Linux Port Released

Vee has been working hard on Open Hexagon last two week, but since he’s not that experienced with Linux, he has been deploying Open Hexagon for Windows only. Luckily he got flibitijibibo to continue his older ports. Thus releasing Open Hexagon 1.84 for Linux.

But with help from my side and even more from Aster’s side, Open Hexagon now uses CMake to build and thus is way easier to deploy on Windows and Linux and we might even see a Mac version, if anyone is willing to test it and compile it for Mac. With those new changes the time was right for version 1.9, which adds a new level pack and a few other changes and fixes, see the full ReadMe for more information.

Thor’s Particle System in Action

Tank has posted an example video on a small game he’s been working on, to get back at C++ again, after a longer time doing web development-only for the company he’s working for. It looks quite nice and demonstrates how easy it is to get a good effect with particles. If you’re looking for easy way to start with particle effects, you might want to checkout Thor, which of course offers many other handy things.

Mini Crown

kaB00M who has been or still is working on a Mana fan game called Seiken Densetsu, posted his newest creation Mini Crown. It seems to be based on Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown upcoming RPG/Beat’em up game and is available for Windows. The game is still work in progress, but it’s still nice to see that people are working on projects with SFML.

Platform – The simple platformer game

The author of yet another platformer called Platform is santiaboy. He has been on the forum only since the beginning of this year, but has now already released his first SFML game. The controls are quite fluid and from the technical part it seems well done, but one of course still notices that it’s a very rough version and needs some more polishing.

Personally I’m quite impressed how far he got his platformer, I always failed at the basic concepts or the collision detection, got frustrated and left my approaches to a simple platformer lying around on my hard disk.

Discussions

Will SFML 2.0 ever see the daylight?

Believe it or not, but the people who’ve been with SFML for quite some time, are waiting on the release of SFML 2.0 already for around three years. I’ve started with a bit of SFML 1.6, but since the ATI bug wouldn’t let me properly execute my applications and since SFML 2.0 already came with a few more bug fixes I switched over rather quickly. The SFML 2.0 back then, wasn’t anything like the SFML 2.0 we have today. We were still using CamelCase for the functions and nobody had ever heard of sf::RenderTexture, sf::Vertex or a few other classes. The API was way more similar to SFML 1.6, what made the switch easier. The big graphics API change was introduce around 1.5 years ago, which was a good day and basically turned SFML into what it is today. The opinions of the community got split when changing the function names from CamelCase to camelCase. Some hated it, some loved it and others found it just ridiculous to even do such a change. Then nearly 1 year ago, we got a release candidate, which made everyone believe that a release would follow within the next few weeks, but as we all know, this hasn’t happened.
So getting back to the title question, will we ever see a SFML 2.0 release? The answer is yes and looking at the milestones on GitHub, we can only see a one open issue for 2.0, where Laurent stated that the tutorials are complete and only parts of the website need to get updated even gave, he even gave a rough ETA, “next month” – you better keep your word Laurent!

New SFML Logo

Unfortunately nobody has commented here on the blog about the last logos, but the discussion on the forum keeps constantly going. Haikarainen posted a new logo, implementing some suggestions by others. The font style looks really well, but personally I don’t see any reason to use an animal for a logo. The most interesting part is though, that Laurent has kind of pointed out the most fitting and we just might see a basic pentagon has SFML’s new logo. Obviously not everyone agrees and thus Nexus has introduce an idea with arrows and made an example. But one should also not forget the two contributions of jabza. Let me know in the comments what you think about the logos.

Changes on SFML

Unfortunately there have been no changes to SFML this week.