I’ve gotten rather quiet here on this blog, but I’d say it’s a good sign, because that way I could spend more time on helping get SFML where it is now. After nearly one and a half years SFML has finally reached version 2.2!
A lot in the SFML source code has changed, though I think the biggest change is not the source itself, but that SFML is now managed by the SFML Team and that with the team new guidelines had to be set in place. Laurent has maintained SFML for a long time alone with help from the community and Marco (aka Hirua) for the OS X parts, but with real life getting more and more time consuming the development slowly but steadily stagnated. Realizing that development was nearly at a stop, he placed Jan (aka Nexus or Bromeon) in charge. This worked relatively well, but the main issue wasn’t solved: SFML is a rather complex project by now and with so more and more users willing to use it, it becomes rather impossible for one person to do all the work, discussing on the forum, writing code for all modules, organizing issues, updating the website, etc. and with such a workload it becomes easy to deny many feature request and keep things as easy as possible. After I had started a discussion on Rethinking the definition of “Simple” we could clear many things and the solution was the birth of the SFML Team.
We all would’ve loved to release SFML 2.2 as fast as possible, but there were just too many issues piled up to go and release a new version, while a lot was still broken. We first wanted to implement multiple features, but then decided to focus on just the Window Focus feature and fixing many other issues. After 177 closed issues the 2.2 milestone has been closed the source code has been tagged. This can essentially be seen as the release, however for many you can only call it a full release if you also provide binaries and as of today, they are online:
The website now also features Contribution Guidelines, a Code Style Guide, explanation on our new Git Workflow, the full Changelog with nice links to all the issues and nearly the most important page Frequently Asked Questions. The FAQ page already holds answers to many, many, many of the common problems which can arise with SFML and we as a team believe that it will reduce the amount of redundant questions and help all the new users advance faster. Next to these new pages we also added a button to the now official SFML IRC channel on irc.boxbox.org and made a lot of changes to the website in general.
With the Holidays coming up soon, there probably will be not that much development happening, but we already have a possible roadmap setup for SFML 2.3 and this time, we’ll make sure it won’t take as long anymore. Stay tuned and Happy Holidays!