FIFE Update

In the latest update, FIFE has been renamed Flexible Isometric Fallout(-like) Engine to Flexible Isometric Free Engine. This to reflect it letting go from its purely Fallout-emulating nature as it is now used for the development of the economy simulator OpenAnno and the RPG Zero Projekt, hopefully with more to come.

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.