ISO 2D RPG engine searching for highly experienced engine & editor coders *updated*

Team name: FIFE developing team. Project name: FIFE - Flexible Isometric Fallout(-like) Engine. Brief description: Just like the name of our project suggests we work on a new open source engine for isometric RPGs. The engine started as a Fallout-related project but we recognized very fast that it offers the potential to be used as a general 2D isometric engine for the development of cross platform RPGs. The engine supports the assets of the original Fallout games but it is meant to be suitable for the creation of all kind of 2D RPGs. We are focusing on the programming of the engine itself but will bundle it with an example mod. This way modders have a starting point to create their own games based on our engine. Since we do not focus on the creation of a complete game we will be working on comfortable and easy-to-use editing tools. Engine and editor are planned to run on all flavours of Linux, Win32 and MacOSX. The FIFE project is almost 20 months in development now and we have released five public pre-alpha and alpha versions of the engine on sourceforge / freshmeat over this time. We did recently release our latest stable milestone: FIFE 2007.1. Now that the work on the 2007.1 milestone is finished, we're currently working out the roadmap for the next two upcoming releases after that: 2007.2 & 2007.3. Target aim: Open source GPL v2.0; non-profit Compensation: We are confident that advanced coders will find it quite exciting to work on the creation and the designing of a whole engine with other experienced and passionate open source coders. But as we're a non-profit project the only thing we can provide is the satisfying feeling to work on an ambitious project. Technology: Linux, Windows, MacOSX C++, Boost library SDL, OpenGL (optional) Warning: It seems that we should have stated this earlier as a lot of coders seem to be overstrained with the undertaking of creating a whole engine. That is not meant to sound rude but FIFE is a quite complicated large-scale project that needs a different working approach compared to smaller projects. We're searching for experienced C++ developers which want to take the challenge and work with other serious and experienced programmers. Please have a look at our code first before you apply for any position. There were several developers who applied for positions in the past who couldn't cope with the task and did leave the team. As this is neither satisfying for you nor for us, the best way to find out if you want to take the challenge is to have a look at our current code base. You can either get the most recent code from our Subversion repository or download a fresh engine snapshot from our homepage (if you're not familiar with SVN yet or don't have the needed tools installed). If you got a Subversion client installed (we suggest to use TortoiseSVN if you're on win32), you should definately go for the SVN checkout. The source packages tend to become outdated rather fast as they're just updated for every major milestone. SVN sourcecode checkout:

Quote:

svn co https://svn1.cvsdude.com/fife/engine/trunk/

HTTP sourcecode download: FIFE 2007.1 src package Talent needed: Engine designer & programmer - position(s) open Advanced C++ skills and engine design knowledge are required for this position as you will need to make design decision about the architecture of the engine. Experience with SDL, OpenGL or QT would be really appreciated but isn't a must. It is far more important that we find someone who can invest a serious amount of time to improve the engine design and give the development a direction. Engine programmer (misc.) - position open We're searching for developers who are able to improve certain aspects of the engine. Possible development areas are: * Audio code development (OpenAL, for a more detailed description, have a look at the following paragraph) * General SDL-related development (e.g. rewrite of the current input manager) * GUI-related development (using luaGUI, our own Lua wrapper for the guichan GUI library) * Map-related tasks (pathfinding, line of sight, etc.) * SDL software renderer development * OpenGL hardware renderer development * Scripting / Lua development * Unit test development Engine audio programmer - position open Our audio programmer has been quite busy lately and had no time to work on the engine audio code therefore. We're trying to find a developer who has experience in working with cross platform programming in general and in working with OpenAL in particular. As there is no other audio expert on the team besides this one inactive programmer, there are unfortunately no well-defined tasks for improving the code. Therefore your task would to be to analyze the current audio code that is in place and develope a strategy for improving it feature-wise and bring up refactoring ideas if you think that even the structure of the code should be improved in specific places. Although the old audio programmer is inactive at the moment, our other developers will help you getting into the code and support you with specific feedback about possible feature and structure improvements of course. So no need to be afraid: you'll be working together with a rather experienced team of developers (this project is in the works since over one and a half years) who will always try to help you out if you run into any dead ends. Editor designer & programmer - position open Advanced C++ skills and engine design knowledge are required for this position as you will need to make design decision about the architecture of the editor. We did initially plan to use qt4 for the editor, however our old editor programmer went absent without official leave :-/ So we decided to leave the decision which GUI library to use for the editor to the programmer who wants to work on it. Some possible choices are:

• Qt4
• CEGUI
• WxWidgets
• Guichan

As long as it's open source and works cross platform (Linux, Win32, Mac) we're fine with whatever library you choose :-) It's hard to define a good starting point for the editor programmer, however he should be familiar with the engine code itself to understand the way the engine works and adopt this concept for the editor. One possible starting point would be to have a look at the recently finished map format design document and the archetypes concept: FIFE XML map format design document Archetypes concept Team structure: (only currently active members listed!) Phoku - engine designer & coder Jasoka - engine designer & coder Sky0 - engine coder jwt - engine coder mvBarracuda - project manager My job as project manager is to keep the team together and to ensure that the communication structure inside the team works so everyone enjoys working on the project. Among other things I'm responsible for the news updates @ FIFEngine.de, the project wiki and to provide the official and unofficial win32 packages. Website: Homepage Development wiki Getting started guide for interested developers Doxygen code documentation Design documents Developer blog Roadmap for the upcoming releases Current release: Stable: FIFE 2007.1 Win32 (official release based on r1004) FIFE 2007.1 src package (official release based on r1004) Experimental: FIFE r1222 Win32 (SVN snapshot) Ways to contact the team: IRC channel: irc.quakenet.org | #fife eMail: mvBarracuda@web.de icq: UIN -> 98600423 Important: You can either use our free XMLmaps with the engine or access the original Fallout maps with it. If you want to use the Fallout maps you will need a legit copy of Fallout 1 or 2. The FO 1/2 maps are far more advanced compared to our own XMLmaps. However the new 2007.1 release ships with our new demo map: official_map.xml. This is the first more advanced FIFE demo map that shows how our map format and specific concepts like archetypes, tilesets and object prototypes work. To give you an impression about the status of the project we took sample screenshots of the current release (The latest two were feature customs maps of the 2007.1 release, however the majority of the shots were taken with Fallout maps and older releases of the engine): New map with buildings created by wulax: Official 2007.1 demo map: official_map.xml: FIFE with real square tiles. Useful for the creation of classical non-ISO 2D games like jRPGs: Split personality. The new multiple cameras feature: Welcome to the New California Republic: FIFE offers a console interface to debug your games with: One of our first custom XML maps with placeholder graphics: Transparency for roof tiles: Feedback: Feel free to add whatever feedback you like :-) Critics will help us to improve the project. [Edited by - mvBarracuda on June 3, 2007 6:51:04 PM]