You're welcome Wrath :-) hopefully we can already release the 2008.1 milestone under the LGPL.

I've already posted this little news update at our thread at the help wanted board but as this might be pretty interesting for the people who consider to create a FIFE-based game I repost it here again:

It's time for yet another FIFE update :-)

This time we got something special for you: a new series entitled "FIFE community spotlight". The idea behind these new community spotlight articles is to have a closer look at the projects which are utilizing FIFE for their games. The first community spotlight covers the computer roleplaying game project "Zero" that is currently in development.

You can read about it at the FIFE blog:
FIFE community spotlight #1: Zero - a postnuclear cRPG

Here is some eye candy from Zero to convince you to actually read the whole community spotlight article:
















Last but not least and slightly related to the community spotlight series: we did recently declutter our wiki starting page. Check out the new and hopefully improved version here:
FIFE wiki

All kind of feedback concerning the community spotlight and the new wiki starting page is appreciated by the team :-)

when i saw them Zero screenshots, my mind shouted "FALLOUT".
seriously though, lovely engine

If you liked the screenshots you should check out the first video that the Zero-Projekt team released today :-)

Zero-Projekt video #1

A little update concerning the planned license switch. We've recently sent out mails to all developers and asked them to agree to the license switch from GPL to LPGL. This seems to be an important step to make FIFE more attractive for independent developers.

You can read about all details at the developer blog:
License mumbo jumbo at the FIFE blog

Welcome to yet another FIFE update!

This one covers a whole bunch of aspects. Finally the end of the license switch process from GPL to LGPL is in sight. Furthermore we're currently replacing our unittests, consider to upgrade to the latest guichan release and plan to release a new win32 compile SDK soon. FIFE recently gained some new developers and the datasets branch will hopefully get merged into trunk rather soon. You got curious?

Check out the full news update at the FIFE developer blog:
FIFE developer blog update

Still not really convinced? Maybe these work in progress screenshot of maps of the upcoming release help:

I'm posting this announcement here as well as the new FIFE release is published under LGPL and some users of the isometric land board expressed their interest in the engine but hoped to see a release under a less restrictive license. All I can say is that we finally made the step from GPL to LGPL though working out all the license switch issues took us quite a long time :-/

Horray for the LGPL release nevertheless!

===============

We've done it again! We proudly present the FIFE 2008.1 release :-)

Download:
Source package (FreeBSD, Linux, Macintosh)
Win32 binaries

For the 2008.1 release we decided to stick to the tropical island concept and called our example game "Rio de hola".

Caution: this release is still lacking a lot of polish, especially the "Rio de hola" game that ships with it. It lacks almost any form of gameplay but there is a reason why we decided to ship the release in its current form nevertheless. We planned to release future FIFE milestones under the LGPL to offer a less "restrictive" license to possible FIFE users (we know that the term "restrictive" is just our personal point of view).

We had to clear up the legal situation first and fortunately the software freedom law center helped us with the transition. The agreement of all developers who contributed code that was still used in FIFE was needed and because over three dozens of people contributed code to the project, this took us a lot of time. We were not able to reach all of them so we decided to either remove or rewrite the code of the contributors who didn't reply to our license switch proposal mails (from scratch).

We were able to replace the last parts of the problematic code today so now FIFE is officially LGPL'ed software. We're glad that we were able to make this step after it took us so long and we think that the new license alone is worth a release. Therefore we're proud to finally present the first FIFE release that is published under LGPL 2.1 or newer (your choice).

Engine and the editor tool made _huge_ steps forward since the last release about 5 months ago. Therefore we decided to release the current status as stable release although it offers not many new aspects on the content side and the content that is in place is very likely to change with the 2008.2 release.

The milestone itself seems to be a very important step into the right direction. You can build your own maps now with the help of the editor tool. Furthermore a basic application structure is in place that should give you an idea how can create your own FIFE-based game; this release is stable enough to start working on your game now :-)

Most important changes since the 2008.0 release:
* License switch from GPL 2.0 to LGPL 2.1 or newer.
* Improved map format & resource loading (datasets branch).
* Vastly improved editor tool; batch object loading.
* New (work in progress) Rio de hola demo: new maps, graphics, sounds (still unfinished!).
* Eye candy: stepless zoom (OpenGL mode only), instance coloring & outlining.

Screenshots & videos:
Just two somewhat representative release screenshots.

Rio de hola:


Editor tool:


No videos from our side this time. You might see a video presentation of the new FIFE release soon nevertheless as the FreeGamer blog considers to cover the release with a short video soon. No final decision made yet but if it they actually create a video of this FIFE release, we'll let you know here :-)

Read the full release announcement at the FIFE developer blog.

Welcome to yet another FIFE update! This time we're proud to bring the second issue of the community spotlight series to you.

In this episode we cover the progress (or the lack of it) of the current FIFE-based projects in general but also the development of the OpenAnno project in detail. OpenAnno is a free and open source realtime economy simulation with strategy elements loosely oriented towards Sunflower's Anno series.

You can read the full community spotlight article at the FIFE developer blog.

Here is a little visual teaser for those who would like to get a first impression of OpenAnno before deciding if it's worth to dive into the mass of text. More screenshots can be found in the full article that is linked above.

This is very impressive. It is good to see that people have started using this.

Thanks O-San :-) Any news from your isometric project?