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FIFE - a cross platform isometric game engine

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Hi guys :) Time for yet another FIFE news update.

As you might already know our old editor coder went absent without official leaving and we've been searching for new developers who wanted to work on the editor. Despite the fact that some people were interested in helping out with editor development, none of them did stick to the task in the long run. There is still one guy left on the team who's interested to work on the editor but has no time to do so :-/

So I want to be totally upfront about this: it seems that there will be _NO_ FIFE editor available for the next couple of months. Therefore the editor beta test is on halt. We'll inform you as soon as there is a willing developer around who brought up a serious concept for it and commited some promising code into SVN. I won't announce anything just because we would have found yet another coder interested who silently leaves the project after that. I intend to spare you and myself this drama.

Phoku, the driving force behind FIFE coding in the last months, was hard working in the last two weeks and plans to write a detailed developer blog update in the next couple of days. He'll talk about the upcoming 2007.1 release and the roadmap for the next two releases: 2007.2 & 2007.3.

There are at least a few promising news in spite of the whole editor nightmare:
1. The work on the 2007.1 milestone is coming along good. That means we plan to have more than two FIFE releases in 2007. There is no release date set but I'll inform you about any details as soon as I know more.

2. Phoku finished his map format draft recently. That means the 2007.1 release will feature a somewhat stable map format so you could start creating maps for FIFE (by hand) despite the lack of a map editor:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Map_Format

3. I didn't talk with phoku about all details but I guess that the
roadmap, that will be announced in the next days, will feature these basic ideas:
3.1 Stable map format with the 2007.1 release
3.2 Stable animation format with the 2007.2 release
3.3 More fleshed out script API with the 2007.3 release

4. Furthemore we plan to organize a FIFE contest entitled "Send them in!". The idea behind this contest is to encourage the modders to send in their self-created GFX. The FIFE team will have a look at the different contributions and will pick a winner after that. We'll use the winner's gfx for the planned 2007.2 demo map that should show the possibilities of the engine without the need to have one of the two Fallout RPGs installed. There is still a lot of planning to do but it's planned to launch this contest after the release of the 2007.1 milestone.

We plan to get news coverage at NMA as soon as phoku's developer blog update is online, we can hopefully announce more details about the "send them in!" contest too.

That's all for today, see you at the next update.
 

Ladonna

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
10,909
Damn, I had hoped this would progress more....

Thanks for keeping at it though. Hope to hear more soon. :)
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Ladonna said:
Damn, I had hoped this would progress more....

Thanks for keeping at it though. Hope to hear more soon. :)
Hehe we all hope to see FIFE progressing faster :) I'm investing quite some time into recruiting and public relations, post on a whole number of boards but we have a hard time to find new developers who are up to the task. There were quite some guys who joined the project because they thought they could cope with it and did silently leave after they realized that they're not able to.

Thanks for the heads up :) This kind of feedback helps us to continue with the project as we know that there are a few RPG fans out there that really count on us.
 

Nedrah

Erudite
Joined
Mar 14, 2005
Messages
1,693
Location
Germany
Isn't quarter to three full of developer gods?
Maybe someone might want to help.
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Nedrah said:
Isn't quarter to three full of developer gods?
Maybe someone might want to help.
Thanks for the pointer but what the hell is "quarter to three"?
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
OccupatedVoid said:
Pssst... He was joking. That place is Xbox360 Kiddie Land.
Ahh thanks for the hint OccupatedVoid :)

Btw.: Are there any talented gfx artists @ RPGCodex around so that I would be worth announcing our upcoming community gfx contest here too?
 

Nedrah

Erudite
Joined
Mar 14, 2005
Messages
1,693
Location
Germany
Surprisingly enough, we do seem to have a few actually talented people here.
Unfortunately, they may or may not mostly be involved with Age of Decadence ;)

Still, go ahead and anounce your contest, I don't think you have that much to lose
 

EliotW

Educated
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
Messages
53
mvBarracuda said:
Psilon said:
http://www.quartertothree.com/
Hmm maybe I'm blind but they don't have a programming section there, have they?

Its a developer and journalist hangout. Anything game related (like FIFE) would go in the games forum.
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Just wanted to announce that we've got a new developer on the team who's currently working to get FIFE running on Macintosh again.

If everything works out as planned, we'll already provide universal Mac binaries for the upcoming 2007.1 release :)
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Higher Game said:
I can't program, so I just have to come in and show moral support. (does a little dance with pom poms) Good luck with it. :)
Thanks for the heads up :)

We hope that our engine turns out to be a successful RPG platform, so the community can give us some nice cRPGs back later.
 

Ladonna

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
10,909
You can already make a sequel using the Arcanum builder that shipped with the game. Theres even a hack for creating a world map.

Makes you think doesn't it....
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Ladonna said:
You can already make a sequel using the Arcanum builder that shipped with the game. Theres even a hack for creating a world map.

Makes you think doesn't it....
Ahh well, that really makes _ME_ think :-/

Maybe it's a bit naive to believe that once FIFE is somewhat stable in all major areas, the modders would suddenly surface everywhere and start building games with FIFE. There are already a bunch of proprietery RPGs you could use as basis for your own mods, so if you want to create your own RPGs you could already start doing so. So our biggest chance is prolly trying to attract the existing modders that already work on mods for different games, e.g. Fallout 2 and convince them that FIFE offers way better options for modding, eases the daily modding work and increases your productivity to a major degree.
 

Ladonna

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
10,909
Crap. Yours should be more modern and hopefully easier to use than some of the monstrosities out there.

AND you should have a better combat engine than Arcanum's.

I was commenting above on an ARCANUM sequel, if somebody wanted to make one using the existing engine.

This is obviously a labour of love for you. If you make it good it will have users for sure, just make sure you guys do a good job.
 

rei1974

Scholar
Joined
Jan 11, 2006
Messages
105
That's very cool. Being an indie dev myself I'll be sure to check it out, even if actually I'm not a very good programmer. I've infinite troubles in making SDL compile under Mac OS lol
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Ahh well, the work on the final fixes for 2007.1 is going extremely slow :-/ Seems like we'll need to delay the release till the end of April, if not even further.

So here is at least a new screenshot of the content that will be featured in the official 2007.1 demo map, stay tuned :)

2007.1.004.jpg


The graphics have been taken from Reiner's tilesets:
http://reinerstileset.4players.de/
 

BigWeather

Augur
Joined
Apr 8, 2007
Messages
271
Reiner's site is awesome... Really cool of him to make his assets available. I've used some of them as placeholders before, but they are really good enough that one could ship with them.
 

Higher Game

Arcane
Joined
Apr 14, 2005
Messages
13,664
Location
Female Vagina
The water could use some work, and most of the trees like like fantasy fare instead of post-apoc, but overall it's great stuff there. :)
 

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