Believe it or not, but here’s a new SFML News post. About half a year is it since the last news post, to all the regular followers of the SFML News I apologize. Writing the SFML News is a time consuming thing and with my internship my focus has been heavily shifted toward web development, but as you may read further down, SFML hasn’t been forgotten.
Given the huge gap, I’m sure you’ll understand that I won’t be presenting all new projects, but well see for yourself, the list is still huge. And because of that I decided to put the other news bits first.
It looks like, this is going to be one of the longest news entry so far, mostly due to the Game Jam, which alone gave me nine projects to present and write down my thoughts about them. But as long as you’re not going to lynch me, for delying the release, I’ll keep writing those news articles and if you really feel like supporting me, there’s some strange orange button on the right side… ;)
Projects
Uoke’s Recovery
Our first project is a simple platformer developed by datMoka as his second project. If you expect something to start and finish in a minute, you’re wrong, because the levels aren’t that easy. I really hope datMoka is going to keep polishing things and fixing some minor issues.
So if you like a bit of a challenge, then Uoke’s Recovery might be something for you. Fun fact: Since I wondered what Uoke could mean, I quickly Googled it and the game’s forum post come up as forth result.
While having this article lying around for a week or so, with parts already written, this game got an update to version 1.1, which now even includes a working patcher.
Whenever I collect topics for forum post, you can be sure, that I’m missing one or the other by accident. If I notice it, I’ll make sure to include it in the next news.
Projects
Mega Man
Are you a fan of Mega Man? Then you should already know of this awesome project, otherwise what are you doing? Go check it out! ZackTheHuman is putting quite an effort into it and personally I think it totally pays off. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around to build it, so I haven’t played it myself. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on that project.
Although I’ve once wanted to make weekly updates on SFML News, the amount of content go more and more, while my time got less and less, thus I eventually stopped. Since there have been many new posts on various projects in the last few days, I decided to make another quick update and present some text and images and because there is so much nice stuff, I’m not going to limit myself on a fixed date in the past. Unfortunately I can’t write about every single project, otherwise this blog post would never end!
Projects
Academic project: Simulation of Scorpion & Mice
This project was presented on the forum for the first time on the 7th if July, it’s an academic project from the Swiss university EPFL and created by the Mac OS X guy behind SFML, namely Marco Antognini aka Hiura. Now the aim of the project was to simulate full life cycles of mice as the prey and scorpions as the predators. The hard part of the project seem to be lying with programming the neural network, rather than getting something displayed with SFML, but in any case it’s quite nice to see SFML being used in notable universities and projects. With this project the use SFML wasn’t just temporarily and won’t stop now, but Hiura says that they’ll be using their SFML based setup in the future, so the next class might be actually learning SFML!
Postmortem – One must die
Postmortem has been first shown over a month on the SFML forum, but it went into Closed Beta just recently and now even tries to get the green light on Greenlight – although I’m still wondering how they’re going to get a free game on Steam… Here’s a quick description from their website:
Postmortem is a FREE Indie narrative-exploratory game that will stress your moral compass this August 15th! Think The Walking Dead meets Home and The Last Express, with a dash of To The Moon – a perfect mix of exploration, conversation, meaningful choices, discovering clues and some puzzles. You are an agent of Death sent to take ONE life from a cast of influential and ambitious characters at a charity Gala, in a rich and complex setting of industrial-revolution, conflict-torn country.
They are of course running their own website and a nice dev blog. It’s nice to see, that they’ve already gotten an article on US Gamer. Personally I think it’s an intriguing idea and definitely worth checking out!
Colonies – A Retro Sandbox Survival MMO
Not a new game presentation either, but they’ve now gone into Closed Alpha phase and since it looks really well polish, I just had to include it here. As the title suggest this is going to be a sandbox game with RPG elements and it should be an MMO or at least O(nline) as well. You should be able to settle, create a village, and defend your friends from the horrible creatures who lurk in the forests. You can change the landscape, farm, or hunt in order to survive the conditions, etc. Whenever the word “MMO” drops people get suspicions, since it’s hard to get done right and needs a lot of skill and time, but feel free to follow Jungletoe’s dev blog and don’t forget to stop by their own community.
Basis: Bone and Sprite Integration System
Some of you might have noticed the Spine project from a few month back, which also has support for SFML and I’ve even helped on Kickstarter. While Spine costs you some money Basis doesn’t cost you anything. Both mentioned applications are for 2D animations of skeletal and sprite creation. Although the tool is free the development still needs to be financed, thus they’ve started a Kickstarter project as well and they could really use some help! A download can also be found on the Kickstarter page.
Council of Torment – 2D dungeon crawler with a rich storyline
Although Council of Torment is still in rather early development it still deserves its place here.
Council of Torment is a top-down 2D dungeon crawler inspired by Ultima IV, with a very rich storyline, gameplay elements that’s been under development for 10 months.
From the description on the forum it seems that a big portion of the development will also go into the story. There’s not much more to talk about for now, but it’s certainly a project to keep an eye on.
Rock, paper, scissor.
I think, I don’t have to explain how this game works or I at least hope everyone knows “Rock, Paper, Scissor”! Although there still seems to be some animation issue, it works fine and can be interesting to try and figure out, if it’s based on some pattern or simply randomly generated. Not only can you download the game itself, but if you want, you can also look at its source code.
Metanact – Filesystem spaceshooter
While nobody has ever heard of Schnommus aka Seb, he seems to have been reading the forum for quite a while now. Judging from his progress on Metanact so far, he also seems to know quite a bit on programming. Metanact’s goal is to explore and conquer your own computer’s file system in a 2D environment. So while playing, the game will go through your file system and pick out various file names and represent them as enemy. While this game reminds me of other “file system” games, which would actually delete the files you’re shooting (e.g. Lose/Lose), Metanact is not such a game. It does not do any harm to your file system. You can find out more about Metanact on their website or even help Seb getting a bit more money together for some more nice content on indiegogo.
2D Platformer using SFML and Box2D
It always amazes me how some is able to create such a rather nice game as their first project. I still haven’t managed to get my own little platformer running (most because I end up doing unnecessary stuff) and others just go ahead and get it done in their first project. Though it seems, he’s using the Public Domain tile-set, I’ve found yesterday as well – visuals are something that can blur the actual vision between good and bad.
GoPlanets
One of my favorite game in the current list is GoPlanets. The idea is rather simple but much fun! You’re red and can send out a certain amount of ships to other planets to take them over. The numbers on the planets display how many ships you can send and based on this number a given percentage will be taken away when sending out ships. The number increase over time automatically, so the longer you wait, the more ships you get, but keep in mind that the computer will try to win everything in the meantime as well. Although the current AI isn’t really challenging it’s still very fun to play. I really hope to see some further development on this project!
Project Blastorium: a Bomberman-esque game
I don’t think anyone will really remember my attempts on a bomberman clone for one of the SCC. I got some result, but it was very messy and I think I’ve never got it really finished after I’ve missed the deadline. Project Blastorium on the other hand is very well polished and introduces some different weapons to the playground, which seems rather interesting. You can follow the progress on the game on the dev blog or just in the forum.
Black and White and Colors
Molyjam 2013 a game jam, where you have 48h to start from scratch to the finished product. They seem to have been three people involved in this project and their final product after only 48h is just mind blowing. It’s simple, but very well polished and the game idea is very good. It would be totally awesome, if they’d go and add some more content, i.e. new levels, since you’ll get to the last level in just a few minutes. You can get the Windows binary from the Molyjam site or read some more information on the forum.
Discussions
SFML Game Jam
This discussion just popped up on the forum, thus it’s still very hot and it seems many people are tuning in on the idea – even Laurent would be excited to see something like this. The goal would be to have a contest going for a specific amount of time (24/48/72h) to start and finish a game using SFML. How, when, where and why is what the discussion is all about, so don’t forget to give your own voice!
Clipboard and Open with Default Application feature for SFML
Originated form the GLFW 3 thread FRex went ahead and proposed the two features. The discussion is still open and if you really want this feature, you should definitely go and write there why you’d like to see this. Personally I think this could be nice, but since it should be relatively easy to implement on my own, it’s not something that should get on a high priority list.
Changes on SFML
There have been so many commits and issue discussions, that I’ve totally lost track. You can however always go and look at the commit history yourself!
My SFML Nightly Builds were quite a few commits behind last week, mainly because I wanted to keep the matching SFML version for Thor and thought I could get the automated building system to work with Thor. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do so in time and thus I only update the latest version section and left the previous section with the older version. Now that GCC 4.8 got released this week, I’m thinking about providing binaries for yet another compiler, but I’m not sure which one I should use. What do you guys think?
Kroniax 5.2, Preview & Source Code
AlexAUT is not resting and keeps polishing his game Kronaix. We’re not at version 5.2, which brought a working Challenge Mode with online highscore and fixed different bugs. He also moved the updates to Indie DB and thus might get some more people to play Korniax.
I’ve posted the last weeks LP not only here, but also on the forum thread and AlexAUT asked me, if he could use my LP as a Preview. I gave him of course the permission, but also offered to create a ‘stand-alone’ preview, which he was even more excited about.
Besides the new official release and the preview, AlexAUT finally published the source to GitHub and with 5 pull requests, he already got some contributions from Haze, iostream and me. Haze made sure, that the source code will compile on Linux, iostream made a conforming Markdown ReadMe and I’ve mainly cleaned up the file naming and structure and added a CMake build system. Feel free to check it out and contribute to it.
Vee has been working hard on Open Hexagon last two week, but since he’s not that experienced with Linux, he has been deploying Open Hexagon for Windows only. Luckily he got flibitijibibo to continue his older ports. Thus releasing Open Hexagon 1.84 for Linux.
But with help from my side and even more from Aster’s side, Open Hexagon now uses CMake to build and thus is way easier to deploy on Windows and Linux and we might even see a Mac version, if anyone is willing to test it and compile it for Mac. With those new changes the time was right for version 1.9, which adds a new level pack and a few other changes and fixes, see the full ReadMe for more information.
Thor’s Particle System in Action
Tank has posted an example video on a small game he’s been working on, to get back at C++ again, after a longer time doing web development-only for the company he’s working for. It looks quite nice and demonstrates how easy it is to get a good effect with particles. If you’re looking for easy way to start with particle effects, you might want to checkout Thor, which of course offers many other handy things.
Mini Crown
kaB00M who has been or still is working on a Mana fan game called Seiken Densetsu, posted his newest creation Mini Crown. It seems to be based on Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown upcoming RPG/Beat’em up game and is available for Windows. The game is still work in progress, but it’s still nice to see that people are working on projects with SFML.
Platform – The simple platformer game
The author of yet another platformer called Platform is santiaboy. He has been on the forum only since the beginning of this year, but has now already released his first SFML game. The controls are quite fluid and from the technical part it seems well done, but one of course still notices that it’s a very rough version and needs some more polishing.
Personally I’m quite impressed how far he got his platformer, I always failed at the basic concepts or the collision detection, got frustrated and left my approaches to a simple platformer lying around on my hard disk.
Discussions
Will SFML 2.0 ever see the daylight?
Believe it or not, but the people who’ve been with SFML for quite some time, are waiting on the release of SFML 2.0 already for around three years. I’ve started with a bit of SFML 1.6, but since the ATI bug wouldn’t let me properly execute my applications and since SFML 2.0 already came with a few more bug fixes I switched over rather quickly. The SFML 2.0 back then, wasn’t anything like the SFML 2.0 we have today. We were still using CamelCase for the functions and nobody had ever heard of sf::RenderTexture, sf::Vertex or a few other classes. The API was way more similar to SFML 1.6, what made the switch easier. The big graphics API change was introduce around 1.5 years ago, which was a good day and basically turned SFML into what it is today. The opinions of the community got split when changing the function names from CamelCase to camelCase. Some hated it, some loved it and others found it just ridiculous to even do such a change. Then nearly 1 year ago, we got a release candidate, which made everyone believe that a release would follow within the next few weeks, but as we all know, this hasn’t happened. So getting back to the title question, will we ever see a SFML 2.0 release? The answer is yes and looking at the milestones on GitHub, we can only see a one open issue for 2.0, where Laurent stated that the tutorials are complete and only parts of the website need to get updated even gave, he even gave a rough ETA, “next month” – you better keep your word Laurent!
New SFML Logo
Unfortunately nobody has commented here on the blog about the last logos, but the discussion on the forum keeps constantly going. Haikarainen posted a new logo, implementing some suggestions by others. The font style looks really well, but personally I don’t see any reason to use an animal for a logo. The most interesting part is though, that Laurent has kind of pointed out the most fitting and we just might see a basic pentagon has SFML’s new logo. Obviously not everyone agrees and thus Nexus has introduce an idea with arrows and made an example. But one should also not forget the two contributions of jabza. Let me know in the comments what you think about the logos.
Changes on SFML
Unfortunately there have been no changes to SFML this week.
