SFML News – Week 16 & 17 (2023)

SFML Development Update

I haven’t invested as much time into SFML development in the past two weeks, which makes it feel like less work was being done, but luckily we have other and even new contributors stepping up, so that feeling is not actually true!

• There’s some movement (pun intended) on the move semantics front:
  • Fixed move semantics for sf::Cursor and added test for it
  • Move semantics for sf::Window, sf::WindowBase and sf::GLResource
• Lots of clean ups and code style changes:
  • Reorder includes hierarchically
  • Enable clang-tidy modernize-pass-by-value check
  • Fix typo in ‘Font.cpp’
  • Implement getFullscreenModes more concisely
  • Fix errors and warnings in templates
  • Simplify ‘FontHandles’ management
• A new feature was requested and implemented for sf::Shape to get the geometric center of a shape
• A few from the community got together and made head way on the new API to set a maximum and minimum window size

Also keep an eye on some very exciting upcoming changes on the audio module. 😉

SFML Projects & Games

Pathfinding & Sorting Algorithms

Remember the Pathfinding video from two weeks ago? It’s funny to me how in the showcase channel on the SFML Discord, there are currently two posts sitting right next to each other talking about pathfinding algorithms.

The second entry is more than just pathfinding algorithms however, as it also contains sorting algorithms and provides for both a custom UI and visualization of the different algorithms. Check it out on GitHub.

RunCrafts

Good old days of Minecraft clones never really went away and who could blame them, it’s such an intriguing idea and allowing for a sandbox experience that is otherwise hard to replicate.

RunCrafts seems to be an attempt to make a clone that is compatible with the original resource files. Currently however, it appears to be not much more than a nice looking menu. You can follow the progress of the project on GitHub.

SFML-Farm

On Twitter I came across a simple farm simulator written with SFML.

You can buy henhouses and build duck lakes to have eggs produced, or if you invest in a smart way and sell at the right market prices, you can also get some goats or cows.

While the provided build doesn’t run due to missing DLLs, it was easy enough to build it from source. Technical issues aside, it took me a while to realize that the duck lake doesn’t cost $500 as the help text says, instead it’s $750, so make sure to invest your money correctly! Also, the game could use some chill ambient music, which would make quite the difference.

You can find the source code on GitHub.

Conclusion

Hopefully we can finish the SFML 2.6 work soon, so I can also turn my full attention to SFML 3, but it’s awesome to see so many people working on different parts of SFML!

In case you’re still looking for some more SFML games to play, check out the SFML Collection on itch.io, which currently features 101 projects. Let me know, if your game is missing!