So I couldn’t cover all the projects from last week, thus I’ll mention a few old ones as well.

Projects

Cloud Wars

We’ve seen the first screenshots of Cloud Wars, a space tactical game in the spirit of Battleships Forever, but with significant RPG elements, over a year ago and if there would’ve been an update, I guess everyone would’ve thought the project is dead, but it’s quite the contrary. There seems to have been a lot of changes, even changing the programming language for C++ to C# but still using SFML.

I hope we’re going to see some binaries in the near future, since the game looks quite interesting.

Zombination

If you’re a fan of zombie games, there might be just another one coming at some point in the future. Zombination is a 2D top-down shooter with a better version of Dead Frontier 2D in mind. The technically interesting part about this project is, that Estivo is using the Let There Be Light lighting library for SFML. I haven’t really seen any project use it, although I’m sure the author has put a lot of work into it.

Greedy Truck

A very small game without much content yet. It was supposedly created in 3h, which is in my opinion quite fast and either the code is an absolute horror or the author is a really good programmer. He’s also setup a small website, which I think could need some coloring.

DreamWorld

Created by MasterQ32, DreamWorld will be an MMO without having an actual game, but rather handing the users the tools to create their own game and play it with their friends. The system seems already quite advanced with many different elements.

Since the release of the game, the author had the idea to switch from 2D to 3D and got quite a few things already setup again. If he was really able to reuse a lot of his old code, then he has clearly written some very flexible code.

It is definitely another project to keep track of and it’ll be interesting to see what else gets created with it.

ImageRunner

Usually all the content here gets pulled from the SFML forum, but I got a comment on one of my WordPress pages, pointing me to another project made with SFML. ImageRunner uses SFML for window creation, input and to render the GUI, while the game itself gets rendered with OpenGL directly. Although everything is in English, it’s rather easy to play once you get that the goal of the game is, to collect all 10 colored boxes in the game. The interesting part is, that the game generates a height map from any image and renders that height in 3D. You can either use the given images or load your own image.

The game idea is very interesting, but given that you’ve no orientation at all and the boxes are rather hard to spot, the gameplay isn’t that great and you’ll need a lot of time, to actually find all the 10 boxes. If you speak Spanish, feel free to follow the developer blog.

Tilemap Editor

Robin, apparently a developer on different games and communities, has been teasing us community members since the beginning of July, by posting some screenshots of a very nice tile editor.

The project just received a refactoring without changing anything on the UI, but also still without a binary. Tiled is a nice tile map editor, but I’m always open for new stuff, especially if they have SFML in mind directly.

ee::MiniEd – A Box2D Editor

Box2D is a very powerful 2D physics engine, but sometimes it’s kind of a hassle to create and position all the objects on your own by hand, thus an Editor would can be very useful. FRex has taken up the challenge to create such an editor, called ee::MiniEd, and even uses SFGUI for the UI.

It’s far from finished, but it’s at least a start and might end up as a very powerful tool. If however you need a Box2D editor now and have some money left over, you could always take a look at R.U.B.E.
Regarding Box2D: If you hate the C-like b2_ prefixes of Box2D, then you’re in luck, because I’ve created a Box2D version, that’s using namespaces and added working support for CMake.

Discussions

Nightly Builds

Given that SFML and Thor have seen a new commit, I’ve updated both libraries’ Nightly Builds. With that update the rubenvb version got completely removed. Currently I’m discussing with myself, whether I should start using the clang build from rubenvb and also provide Nightly Builds for it. clang seems like a very good compiler, but I’m not sure how far the Windows support is and what problems there are. What is your opinion on clang mixed with Windows?

My Small Website – SFML Forum

SFML Jam

The discussion around the SFML Jam is still going on and not much has been set in stone. Currently the dates have been set to 2^nd through 4^th of August. The specific rules are still under heavy discussion, especially since people can’t agree on whether OpenGL should be used or not. As said before, I’m more against the use of raw OpenGL, since the contest should be about SFML and if you simply use OpenGL and an SFML window to get started, but ignore all the other parts, then it doesn’t matter that the window creation code was with SFML, since it could’ve been as easily SDL, GLFW or Allegro or about any other similar library. The theme submission is open till Friday, so if you want to see one of your themes getting picked, then you’ll have to post it on the forum.

Source Code Changes

Since the last News post SFML has received five new commits, four of which are for one pull request. Kratos714 has pointed out some critical issues in the SFML source code and I think Laurent very gladly accepted his pull requests. The last commit, that didn’t have anything to do with that said pull request, was the change of the version number. SFML’s version number in code is now 2.1 instead of 2.0. Those following very closely the GitHub site, might have noticed that SFML got also tagged as 2.1, thus we’ll see the bugfix release very soon! Funny enough though, my Nightly Builds are already SFML 2.1.