SFML News – Week 20-25 (2023)

Screenshot from the GitHub Release for SFML 2.6.0

It’s already been five and a half years since the last release and the changelog does show this. What I’m most proud of however is this:

We got 74+ people contributing to this release! It really goes to show that SFML is a community project.

While I hope we can keep the contributor count high, I plan to release SFML 3 much earlier and not wait another five years…

What’s Next?

We’ve already merged two small build fixes to the 2.6.x branch and as such plan to have a 2.6.1 release somewhen in the near future. However, that release will really just contain a handful of important fixes and the focus has shifted onto SFML 3 now.

The Roadmap will see a bit of an update over the coming days/weeks, but I don’t really plan on expanding the SFML 3 scope much further. From my point of view, we still have some C++17 work cut-out for us, which remains the primary focus of SFML 3.

SFML Games & Projects

While I wish to go into details about every project and game that uses SFML, it’s a very time consuming task to try everything, as such, I’ll just list the projects with a link an a screenshot.

Hymn

A two part mini-devlog about Hymn, a game jam game

Balloons vs Towers

Someone on the SFML Discord started this project with overall little experience and it’s just awesome to see how things have come together: https://github.com/Berindza-VNorman/balloongame

System Monitor

A system monitoring tracker for CPU and RAM usage: https://github.com/C00kiess/tracker

Don’t Touch the Spikes

A sort of vertical Flappy Bird. Unfortunately, there isn’t yet an playable version or source code available.

Purveyor

A math game through the eyes of a purveyor: https://cysnot.itch.io/purveyor

Retro Game

A top-down fantasy shooter in the style of a retro game: https://github.com/sebe324/retro-game

Screenshot of a top-down shooter that still work in progress

Qalm

Hapax (or Hapaxia on GitHub), has created a full on music editor and tracker combined. It has a really old-school look and feel to it: https://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=29039.0

Selba Ward – Update

Let’s directly remain with Hapax and look at the three new drawables that were added to Selba Ward:

Starfield 3D

Polygon

Pixel Display

SFML 2.6.0 Is Going Places

It’s always fun to see in what corners of the internet, the news of a new SFML release has been carried – some of the news reporting is of course our own doing.

Will update the list, if I spot some other posts.

Just In…

I created a pull request to update the vcpkg port in order to use SFML 2.6 and it got already merged! 🥳