ZEngine - 2D SDL and OpenGL Engine / News: Recent posts

The changelog for source is massive, and I didn't even document all the new features.
I really started to tear into ZEngine again over break, but I realized I changed too much
for a smooth transition from 0.8.5. I'm going to sit back and restructure all my efforts
and do some more reading, between school and trying to maintain ZEngine I haven't had much
time, so I figure I'll kick back and write a game or something. I figure this won't affect
many people because so few people use ZEngine. If anyone is actively using ZEngine I'd really
like to hear from you as I try to sort out what direction to go next.... read more

ZEngine 0.8.5 is released and has pretty large list of changes. To help Windows developers that the removal of VC6 may hurt Dev-C++ project files have been added, and on Linux the build system has been improved, this should help those hurt by the faulty VC6 STL (VC.NET still supported). The SDL-only backend option has returned. Two new ZImage features: the added ability to draw with shading options and the also to specify a clipping rectangle. ZImage,ZSound and ZFont are now able to load from a zip archive via the included zlib library (Replacing old more complex PhysFS code). In addition, several other features have been added, some small bugs have been fixed. The next item on my todo list is to get some more tutorials out there, and hopefully another Gewi release. The Gewi bugs which have been reported so far were actually ZFont bugs, and so all the Gewi bugs are fixed as of ZEngine 0.8.5. I've recently become aware of a few feature requests, and I'll try to get those into a 0.2.1 release of Gewi in the next few weeks. As far as the next features added to ZEngine, I'm pretty excited about what'll start showing up in the next few releases, the more specific classes that will really help ZEngine separate itself from other libraries are in development, some of which are experimental, and some of which I'm pretty certain will be in by 0.8.6. More details on that and the future of the networking code which was removed from ZEngine in favour of an external networking library is on it's way soon, feel free to sign up for the new ZEngine mailing lists (http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=62098) or make some comments on the ZEngine forums(http://www.conceptofzero.net/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4).

Gewi, the long promised GUI addon for ZEngine has been released, since this is the first public release it hasn't been tested on many systems, but is known to work on Windows and Linux, and contains a large example program. Gewi is not my main project, so will see less updates than ZEngine, but I will be very willing to accept user contributed widgets and code for Gewi.

The first change I made after the 0.8.3 release was to accomodate the GUI library I'm developing, Gewi, and for those who are waiting I should let you know I'm packaging it all up as I upload 0.8.4. 0.8.4 has some changes in it that I think will really benefit the users of ZEngine. ZConfigFile no longer adjusts every file it touches, but it now allows for comments and ignores whitespace, making it much more suitable for user edited configurations. The particle system was redesigned and added, and is now designed to be easy to use and even easier to modify. (Don't let the template system scare you, it simply allows customization of the members of the particle itself.) The code was documented in places where things were not clear, rewritten for tiny optimizations, and everything got a little cleaner, some of the code hadn't been looked at in a while and got a good check to make sure everything was still working properly internally. The links at the top of http://zengine.sourceforge.net/ have also been changed, and if you're looking for dependencies, forums, or the mailing lists you should check the new links.

ZEngine 0.8.3 has been released, with ZClient and ZServer as well as bugfixes and some new features around the corner everybody should upgrade to this release. Hopefully I'll be posting news on the ZEngine GUI project (Gewi) very very soon.

ZEngine 0.8.2 has been released as well as a new tutorial on using ZEngine.
For the latest tutorials visit: http://conceptofzero.net/tutorials/zengine/

Sorry about the quick release after 0.8.0, but 0.8.1 brings no code changes, just some added files and VC6 project files. A lot of VC++6 users were complaning so Sean from ConceptOfZero.net was nice enough to help me out and make a VC6 version.

(Side note: would whoever is monitoring the file release please get in contact with me at james@conceptofzero.net)

This is the big one, the ZEngine 0.8.0 Release is here! Just in time for 2003!
Since this is a major release there is a zip for MSVC with precompiled libraries, you'll
need to grab both 0.8.0 zip files, but the ZEngine-0.8.0-vclibs.zip has the libraries ready
to be dropped into the ZEngine-0.8.0/libs folder.

I would like to release 0.8.0 to welcome the new year, so if you find any bugs please hurry up and report them. ZEngine tested memory leak free, which was a goal for 0.9, so I hit it ahead of time. (If you'd like a memory leak checking verision of ZEngine on Windows contact me.)

This is the second release candiate, and this should be the final RC before the full 0.8 source and binary release.
Heavy testing is appreciated, and if anybody would like to help out on the project feel free to contact james@conceptofzero.net.

The ZEngine project just changed the 2D backend from SDL to OpenGL, which has resulted in much faster 2D drawing in all the tests, as well as more room for future expansion.

Major Release, Version 0.6.1 completes the OO wrapper around the more useful SDL interfaces, major changes found throughout.

This is the initial release. It contains the ZEngine, ZTimer, ZFont, and ZImage classes, as well as the Doxygen documentation for the entire project.