SFML News – Week 26-27 (2023)

SFML 2.6.1

Looking at the last three minor releases, it was forseeable, that we would be releasing a patch version for SFML 2.6 some time soon. So far we’ve merged four fixes:

• Don’t overwrite module path
• Loosen restrictions on unrecognized compilers
• Remove C++11 header 🤭
• Ensure OpenGL extensions have been loaded 🐛

The C++11 header issue was found, while getting the Conan package ready, which has since been merged.

The OpenGL extension bug, was reported and fixed in under an hour! 😄

SFML 3

SFML 3 has received some small updates, like better assert() messages, and some improved X11 memory management.

In the back Thrasher has however been tackling the Window States & Styles solution design, so hopefully we get to see an initial implementation soon.

If you want to stay up-to-date with the latest discussions, then I can only recommend to join the SFML Discord server and watch the #contributing channel.

CSFML 2.5.2 / SFML.Net 2.5.1

With all the excitement about SFML 2.6.0, I completely forgot to mention the release of CSFML 2.5.2 and SFML.Net 2.5.1. The reason it took quite a while to push out new versions, was for one the tooling needed to be brought up-to-date and beating macOS into submission getting the macOS SFML.Net builds to correctly detect CSFML was quite the “adventure”. Already for the CSFML 2.5.1 version, I spent a lot of time, trying to understand the process and getting it work. The two key break-through points were:

• Realizing that for some reason the .NET loader can’t handle the .dll extension on macOS, despite documentation claiming that it does
• Giving up on CMake to correctly set the RPATH and just manually fixing the SFML dependency paths

Writing about this just reminded me, that someone (ha! as if anyone besides me will do it) needs to update the website with new builds for CSFML. 😅

CSFML 2.6.0

Thrasher and dogUnbound have been hard at work to get all the SFML 2.6.0 features implemented in CSFML 2.6.0. Being able to close that chapter, would allow us to move development of CSFML to version 3, which will be facing interesting challenges, due to modern C++ changes in the SFML API.

SFML Games & Projects

Bullet Hell Game Engine

Erik has been working a lot on their Bullet Hell Game Engine over the past two weeks, with the community helping out with various questions. It’s quite nice seeing the progress overall! 🙂

I haven’t looked at the code, but you can, if you want to: https://github.com/erikbolumburu11/Touhou-Clone-Engine

2D Graphics with SFML.Net

In 2018, I held a Lightning talk at the Meeting C++ conference, five years later I took that presentation and rewrote the code to use SFML.Net, and presented it during the Team Meeting. Since nobody at work will be writing C++ anymore, I thought it would at least have some relevance or familiarity, when showcasing it with .NET.

• Slides
• Soure Code

100 Snakes in AI Battle Royale

Kofybrek’s latest video on the game Snake with genetic “AI” training is, as always, very entertaining, while packing a lot of content into it. Highly recommend to watch it!

Of course, you can find the source code to the video on GitHub.

WLA – Windows-Linux-Android SFML Project Template

Can’t have a post without some new project by Zombieschannel! 😄

This time we’re being blessed with a Project Template for Visual Studio, which allows you to build for Windows, Linux and Android in one project, and maybe in the future even macOS and iOS.

Check it out: https://github.com/Zombieschannel/WLA

Creating a Game With ChatGPT

Unfortunately, I don’t have any code to link, but still found it quite an interesting video to show here.

I’ve made a similar attempt some time ago, when someone was asking a lot of questions about creating a game on Discord. My main challenges then were the output limit and that it often stopped mid response. While ChatGPT seems to be quite helpful in case of some tricky input or math logic, it needs a lot of instructing to get the wanted results and often seem to “forget” about a previous requirements.

ZLE

Zombieschannel Level Editor supports sprite and tile map editing, as well as shader testing and a particle system tool. By the looks of it, it’s using imgui for the UI rendering.

Two Zombieschannel projects in one post, double score! 😄

Minesweeper

A classic Minesweeper implementation, with bombs, flags and smilies!

You can check out the source code and try it out from GitHub.