Lixoo 2D adventure game engine / News: Recent posts

Well, now my computer has returned from the dead, I have been working a little in some stuff that was postponed. This afternoon I have been adding the KDict and related classes to the Klasses library. Also, I'm thinking of a good design for the graphics part of the engine, that will be capable of having multiple backends (the first one will be SDL, I think). Object-oriented design is "kool" xD. Note: New code is in CVS, until it's well tested.

My iBook was one of the ones with the faulty logic board... and it died by june. I had to wait for it to be repaired until now! It arrived yesterday, and it seems that all works fine. The people at Apple even didn't touch the data in my hard disk :) But all the work I planned to do this summer is missing... I hope to code a bit until october, at least.

After some time without writing new code, I have finally updated the CVS tree with the latest sources I have been working with: the Klasses library and the initial code of an SDL wrapper, both coded in Objective-C.
Why Objective-C? Because it's the language finally chosen to write Lixoo in. After exploring the ins & outs of C++ and Objective-C I have found that I prefer the latter.

As you might notice news headlines are back from the dead. Finally I had some time to fix the script that gathered the news from SF. What I did finally is taking an RSS feed and with a little Python script changing it into well-formed XHTML, suitable to be included in the main page. Yeah, Python rules!

I have been learning a bit (or two) of PHP, so I have rewritten the site using PHP and changed lots of things to CSS. Now even the nice rollovers at the top of the page are done using CSS! No need for JavaScript, hehe :)_

Hi! Some people may have been wondering what is happening behind the scenes... so I decided to let you know what's going on.

Basically, I have been quite busy with LuaCheia in my spare time (I'm helping there with the MacOS X port, check it out at http://luacheia.sourceforge.net\), so I didn't work too much with Lixoo.

But that mighty project called Lixoo is not died at all. It was my wish for a long time having making my own engine, and now I'm started it, my wish changed: now I want to finish it! It will take time, but I hope it will be worth waiting for it.... read more

The latest release of liblrt (0.3.4) is now available for download at the files section. CVS respository was updated as well.

This is the latest codebase I'm working on. After hours and more hours of wasted time with lots of coding tricks in ZeroForce, I decided to switch to C++, and here's the result. Basically, you get the same features as with the older library, but with cleaner interface, all the power of C++ and some new features, like a integrated leak detector (enabled by default in beta builds like this) or a wrapper class to access memory-mapped files (I'm sorry, but this only works under OSX & Linux at the moment),.... read more

I have been talking to Alives, and we he's managing to handle site updating, so I have more time to write code.
Maybe the layout, look and other things of the site will be changed, but I'm sure he will do a good job. Thanks, dude!

Yeah! Finally I was able of painting to the screen under MacOS X, both in fullscreen modes (doing the neccessary video mode switch) and inside windows. So be prepared, as the graphics kernel of Lixoo is under heavy development right now.

As you may notice, I have changed a bit the main page. The Lixoo logo is now showing a cute "o" saying "peace". I know that maybe it's too late to make such an update, but I want to express our reject to any kind of war.

Er... well... here's another update. Only small changes this time in the site layout (the Lixoo logo at the upper right corner now has a link to the SF project page), but I have released version 0.2.3 of ZeroForce and uploaded its API documentation. The docs are very brief for now, but I think they can be a good help for people wanting to hack/use the library. Enjoy :P

Now usiing CGILu to generate dynamic content. I hope that updates will be more frequent as most of the content (headers, rollovers an so on) is now automatically generated with just a small Lua script.

The Lixoo website will be progressively migrated to generate content on-the-fly using CGILua (http://tecgraf.puc-rio.br/cgilua). I plan to add in the future, when Lixoo is released a small lixoo-wiki page so users will be able of collaborating with the site. Stuff in the planning (but with no date assigned) are making homebrew, Lua-based forums.

I finally decided to rename Sphinx because I was not convinced with its name. The new one tastes better with the new style of the API, too.
Version 0.2 will be backward-incompatible with 0.1, sorry for the inconvenience.
Threading became the most important thing, so it will be implemented as soon as possible. I hope to have threads workin in version 0.3, so some things planned to be added in earlier version will be moved to 0.4.
This is because I want to start working on the main core of the Lixoo engine the next weeks, and I need threading working.

As you can see, now the latest news headlines grabbed from Sourceforge are shown in the main page of the site. The most recent five news are refreshed every 45 minutes. I hope you all will like this feature :)

As well as the webpage update, a new release was made after Christmas: the prerelease version of Sphinx version 0.1, a library that will ensure portability in Lixoo by hiding specific operating system details to programs using it --mainly threading, dynamic loading and filesystem facilities--. Happy new year.

I've added the "No more Prestiges" banner at the bottom of the webpage, as a sign of complain about insecure oil tankers sailing all around the world with flags of convenience with lots of irregularities. The sinking of the Prestige affected lots of miles of coast in Galicia, whre we live.

I hope you like it ;P

Better documentation is being written for Lapse, now using LaTeX. Documentation on the API is finished, and some more will come with upcoming revisions od the library. Ready-to-read PDFs are included with the distribution of the package.

Lapse is a small & lightweight implementation of the pooled resource-allocation techniques.

Kike Temes se une al equipo, ya somos dos programando!

As you may know, COMM is one if Lixoo's parts (the one that holds the component loading system and the Lua scripting engine). Recently I have added an option to build a standalone version of COMM on Unix-like OSes (Win32 will come soon), and version 0.1-tp1 of libcomm will be released during September. The suffix "tp" suffix is for "Technology Preview", as all standalone releases (i.e: wthout the rest of Lixoo) of individual components will be marked.

I'm taking care of writing documentation about the design of the Lixoo engine. It's available in the docs section of our site (http://lixoo.sourceforge.net/docs.html). Take a look, buddies. I'll be updating it from time to time, so stay tuned!

Aqui Mebius, me gustara que fueseis echando un vistazo al foro privado de desarrolladores (recordad que tenis que hacer login) y opinarais sobre cosillas que hai que decidir. Ms detalles en http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=55588