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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 2D games. 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 games in general and RPGs in particular. The engine supports the assets of the original Fallout games but that does NOT mean you're bound to them in any way. We are focusing on the programming of the engine itself but will bundle it together with an example game. This way developers have a starting point for their own FIFE-based projects. Since we do not focus on the creation of a complete game we're working on comfortable and easy-to-use editing tools. Engine and editor tools are meant to run on all flavours of Linux, Win32 and MacOSX. The FIFE project is over 22 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. Our last major milestone 2007.1 was released in April 2007 and now we're hardworking to finish the work on the next version of FIFE till the end of the summer. Target aim: Open source GPL v2.0; non-profit Compensation: We are confident that interested developers will find it quite exciting to work on the creation and the design of a whole engine with other experienced and passionate open source programmers. But as we're a non-profit project the only thing we can provide is the actual development experience that you'll gain and 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 programmers 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 who want to take the challenge and work with other mature and experienced developers. Please have a look at our source 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: 
New map with buildings created by wulax: 
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 July 29, 2007 11:18:27 AM]
Quote: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 any of the 3rd party libraries that we're utilizing 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 * Map-related tasks (pathfinding, line of sight, etc.) * SDL software renderer development * OpenGL hardware renderer development * Scripting / Python 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 our former audio programmer is not on the team anymore, 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 have full support by the other developers if any issues arise so we're sure that we can tackle all upcoming problems as a team. Python programmer - position open We did recently add Python support to our engine by utilizing SWIG. Python support was just meant to be a proof of concept but as it worked out very well we decided to replace our old design (lua as embedded scripting language) with SWIG (giving us the possibility to extend the engine instead and support a number of other scripting languages besides lua, e.g. python, ruby or even OCaml). You would work on implementing features into FIFE that are not performance-critical and can be written in Python therefore. Basic C++ knowledge will be sufficent; advanced Python experience is more important for this position. Another plus would be if you would have worked with SWIG before and could help out with possible arising issues (e.g. object ownership between engine and script side or exception handling were two of the potential pitfalls we did recently discover). We're using the Python-based SCons tool as build system for our project. Experience with this build tool would be another fantastic additional skill for any interested developer as we intend to improve our build scripts before we ship our next major public release. Team structure: (only currently active members listed!) Jasoka - engine designer & programmer jwt - engine designer & programmer Mutex - engine programmer mortiz - engine programmer mvBarracuda - project manager prock - engine programmer 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 recruitment of new developers, 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 AT web DOT de ICQ: 98600423 MSN: mvBarracuda AT web DOT de AIM: barrafife 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 of the current status of FIFE we took sample screenshots of the current release (The latest two 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): Official 2007.1 demo map: official_map.xml:
svn co https://svn1.cvsdude.com/fife/engine/trunk/
New map with buildings created by wulax: 
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 July 29, 2007 11:18:27 AM]
