FIFE Update

[Brother None]

For its third anniversary, FIFE is being renamed from Flexible Isometric Fallout(-like) Engine to Flexible Isometric Free Engine, and sadly loses part of its team.<blockquote>Linux OpenGL bug fixed

At the beginning we're proud to announce that one of the OpenAnno programmers - who also recently joined FIFE developent - has finally tracked down a bug that caused issues for us for over a year. The bug caused segfaults on some Linux systems if FIFE was built with OpenGL support whenever an exception was thrown. Yonibear found out that the issue is caused by bad Linux OpenGL drivers that were compiled with a special thread-local-storage flag that collided with libstdc++.

I don't want to bore you with details: the workaround that he found is to explicitly link against libstdc++ before linking against any OpenGL libraries. The fix has been applied to the FIFE trunk and a bug report has been filed. Great work Yonibear!

Rewrite of the rendering pipeline

It looks like Yonibear can't get enough of digging through C++ code so he decided to start looking into cleaning up the rendering pipeline to build a fundament for optimizing it later. We've opened a poll at our forums to find out who's still using the SDL rendering backend - especially now that the !OpenGL Linux bug was finally fixed. We want to find out if it's worth still supporting software rendering or if we should get rid of it; this might give us the chance to optimize the OpenGL renderer further as we don't need to worry about backwards compatibility.

Some first new rendering code can be already found in our Subversion repository in a separate branch. Fell free to check it out!

FIFE becomes Flexible Isometric Free Engine

The poll about the new name for the project has recently ended. We searched for a new name / acronym meaning for the project to underline that we've moved away from our Fallout roots. The proposal "Flexible Isometric Free Engine" clearly won the poll and the key developers I've spoken to were all fine with this new name. So we're proud to announce the new name of the project: long live the Flexible Isometric Free Engine!

3 years of FIFE birthday party

I planned to announce this way earlier but unfortunately university kept me busy :-/ FIFE turns 3, tomorrow, 2008/09/11. Every interested developer, supporter and community member is invited to have a chat with the FIFE developers and party with us a bit. Meet us in the evening hours (GMT) at the official FIFE IRC channel.

My departure

Another reason why you might want to attend the IRC birthday party tomorrow is because it is also my personal departure party. I was working on FIFE for over 3 years (I've been already involved in the project that later was transformed into FIFE) and I really enjoyed working with so many talented and enthusiastic other developers. In this 3 years there was less time for other activities outside of FIFE, e.g. university and my private life. Now it's finally the time that I'll sort out these two things and I've found out that I'm not good at doing so while trying to spend as much time as possible on FIFE. Last but not least I need to admit that my personal motivation sank in the last months. If you've been doing something for such a long timespan, the time might come when you simply want to do something different. This time has come for me now. </blockquote>Link: Music when the lights go out - FIFE update.

 

[shihonage]

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet." - Adolf Hitler



Okay. On a more serious note, IMO a lot of development time seems to have gone into features not many will find useful - such as "isometric rotation" which was last used in "Little Big Adventure" series, and only because they had simple tilesets with multiple versions of the same tile.

I hope their scripting support is strong enough to sustain the ambitions of Zero Projekt in its current state.

 

[chewie]

Okay. On a more serious note, IMO a lot of development time seems to have gone into features not many will find useful - such as "isometric rotation" which was last used in "Little Big Adventure" series, and only because they had simple tilesets with multiple versions of the same tile.

That's not quite correct - Openanno uses this feature by design. Furthermore, the "isometric rotation" was a small step because of FIFE's "2.5 D" nature.

I hope their scripting support is strong enough to sustain the ambitions of Zero Projekt in its current state.

Full python support - there would be nothing more to add Scripting in FIFE is completely different then it is for e. g. Fallout. No crippled language, but instead a full featured programming language which is also in use for many different types of applications.

On the other Hand - FIFE is OpenSource. So what ever feature it needs, we can add it.

 

[Dagon]

Openanno uses this feature by design. Furthermore, the "isometric rotation" was a small step because of FIFE's "2.5 D" nature

I haven't followed the development of this engine but does (or will?) it support 3D models on prerendered background?

 

[mvBarracuda]

I haven't followed the development of this engine but does (or will?) it support 3D models on prerendered background?

ATM there is just support for prerendered graphics. In case we decide to drop the support for the software renderer and focus on the OpenGL backend we could add support for real 3d models later. But there are no plans for this at the moment.

 

[iridium_ionizer]

I haven't followed the development of this engine but does (or will?) it support 3D models on prerendered background?

My understanding is that FIFE will support 3D effects (such as layering, tilting, rotation) on 2D planes (made from composited tiles). Check out FIFE Features.

 

[Polynikes]

FIFE becomes Flexible Isometric Free Engine

FIFE is dead to me now.

Nah, just kidding, I wish them luck in their future endeavors.

 

[PaladinHeart]

Yeah, good luck with the engine. I'm glad there are people who are finding it useful. I felt lost with it when I tried it a while back. =P
That was when they had the whole island demo thingy. It was rather glitchy with the movement. I hope the other games that people are making with the program don't suffer from the same problems.

I guess it's because I'm more use to editing tools like those with the Jagged Alliance series, Fallout Tactics, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft. I figured if I could learn and use Fallout Tactics editing tools then I should be able to learn this (as from the news posts it sounded like a rather friendly system to use).

I think these are basically useful tools for people who already know what they're doing when it comes to programming languages such as C++ and know how to make a game.

 

[mvBarracuda]

I think these are basically useful tools for people who already know what they're doing when it comes to programming languages such as C++ and know how to make a game.

Indeed

The plus of FIFE is the increased flexibility and the option to actually modify everything you want due the open source nature of the project. The drawback is that it's a complete engine instead of a game so you'll end up writing a lot of game-specific code on your own.

It's more meant for the people who want to create a game but couldn't find an engine that suits their needs yet. If there is another less-flexible engine around that works for your game idea it's prolly better-suited than FIFE as it might be geared towards a specific type of game.