Whenever I collect topics for forum post, you can be sure, that I’m missing one or the other by accident. If I notice it, I’ll make sure to include it in the next news.

Projects

Mega Man

Are you a fan of Mega Man? Then you should already know of this awesome project, otherwise what are you doing? Go check it out! ZackTheHuman is putting quite an effort into it and personally I think it totally pays off. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around to build it, so I haven’t played it myself. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on that project.

Loloid-Attack

I was rather confused, when I heard that title for the first time, but as soon as you get past the first asteroid waves, you’ll understand. Unfortunately it’s relatively short and if you die or kill the end boss, that game will simply close itself. If you want a short challenge and a bit of laughter, then you can download the Windows binary on the forum.

VideoStream (.NET)

This is a simple video player written in C++ with a C binding, so it can be used with .NET, i.e. C#. Knowing how complex FFMPEG can be to work with, it’s nice to see the work zsbzsb has done on the VideoStream player. You can take a look at the full feature list and further details over at the forum. From there you should also be able to find the source code.

Save the Chicken

Next up we have a funny looking game, which still needs some polishing and probably also some polishing regarding the game play. If you like some funny beat’em up you might want to bookmark the forum post, so you can check it from time to time or of course simple check my news posts for further updates.

Smart Defender

Usually in the game development scene, one gets PC games ported over to the mobile market, Smart Defender on the other hand went the other way around. The author smartties decided to port his game to SFML and has done so rather quickly. As the name suggests, the game mechanic is set as a Tower Defense game. There is a Windows binary on the forum, but it seems to have some issues, thus I can’t start it on my PC, but it’s definitely functional for others.

NEAT Visualizer [Update]

Do you remember the NEAT Visualizer that I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts? It’s a visualization of some AI, which uses neural networking under the hood, rather complex topic, but to look at it, you don’t need to understand the whole theories behind it. But if you like to know more about how it works, then you can read the article lolz123 wrote. Besides the published article, NEAT Visualizer is now at version 2.1 and added quite a few different things.

ee::MiniEd [Update]

Are you working on your perfect Box2D game, but you’re missing a way to easily create new levels? Give FRex a nudge, so he might work even faster towards a release! For now you can just look at another screenshot which looks already more like an editor. Don’t forget to take a long look at the nice UI – SFGUI is just great!

Zombination [Update]

I hope you remember this game from the last news post, because it looks really good and I’ve high hopes that this turns out to be a nice slaughter feast. After the last post, I’ve been looking closely at the statistics on the blog and have noticed that quite a few visitors came from a certain for me unknown forum. Quickly looking at it, I’ve noticed, that it seems to be the “original” post in the developers native language.

ImageRunner [Update]

Remember that game I didn’t get from the forum, guess what there’s actually a forum post about it, it’s just from earlier this year. Given that I didn’t follow the forum closely in that time, it seems I’ve missed it. The game got another update and is now at version 0.0.5 and still in beta. The new feature is now, an easy way to translate the game to different languages. English should now be included, but given that the developer is not a native English speaker, it might still contain some unclear descriptions. If you want to translate it into your language or have some suggestions to the English version AlejandroCoria will be thankful if you shoot him a message.

GoPlanets [Update]

I’ve saved in my opinion the best game for the last project presentation. I forgot to mention in the last post, that the “Go” in the game’s name, has a further meaning, because GoPlanets was created with Google’s programming language Go. Now for the update, we get a different looking menu, some nice new effects and the most important part a bit a more challenging AI. Actually the game can now be quite hard, but it’s again rather easy to find out, that the AI now will nearly always go for the planets with the lowest population count. The information doesn’t help much, but it’s at least important to keep an eye on that count, otherwise the enemies will rush your planets. Besides the new and better stuff, there’s also a bug, where the round ends, even though there are still enemy or friendly ships around that potentially could take over another planet.

Discussion

SFML 2.1 Released

Yes that’s right! We didn’t have to wait another few years for the new version – it’s nice to see that SFML is moving forward. There aren’t any new features, but quite a few bug fixes. The API is fully compatible, thus you don’t have to fear any issues. If you’re using the 2.0 release the update to 2.1 is definitely advised. A detailed change log can be found here and the new pre-built binaries can be found as usual on the download page. My Nightly Builds match the revision number of the 2.1 release, if you’re using a different compiler.

SFML Game Jam

The Jam will start today, thus if you want to participate, make sure to read the forum post and maybe go through the listing of the themes, to get an idea of what the final theme could be. Personally I feel the whole thing is not very well planned, but I hope we get some nice games out of it and that it can open up a path for Jams in the future.

Final Words

It has been again a packed week with lots of updates and changes. It is very well possible that I’ve missed again a few more or less important topics and thus, if you feel like I’ve left out something, please let me know in the comments below, on IRC, the forum, email or any other creative way you can think of.