Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 / News: Recent posts

Building Games with Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 is a new book (written by SGDK2's author) now available on Kindle and in paperback, covering how to implement various aspects of scrolling games in detail with examples from online content.

Minor fixes and enhancements in this version, including the ability to run an HTML 5 project in a browser with a single click or keypress.

With this release you can develop HTML5 games targeted at mobile devices with touch interfaces, such as iPad. See the full list of changes at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sgdk2/files/sgdk2/2.2.2/ and see a simple demo project at http://sgdk2.enigmadream.com/ben/Mobile.html

SGDK2 can now export fully functional games to HTML5 format rather than just the maps and sprites. There are still a few limitations, but functional games straight out of the IDE are now possible. For details of supported functions, see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AuyO-2scTVuRdFBpTUZoM0NNRzhXVXdud1E5a3A4cFE&output=html.

Scrolling Game Development Kit can now export graphics, tiles, sprites and scrolling maps to an HTML 5 page accessible to mobile devices and other HTML5-capable browsers. See the latest at http://sgdk2.sf.net/. See a running sample at http://sgdk2.enigmadream.com/ben/Html5Sample.html

The main feature of this release is better support for a wider range of video drivers. SGDK 2.1 no longer requires the video hardware/drivers to support the GL_ARB_texture_rectangle feature. It also improves error reporting so that the user can easily jump to the source of compile errors when they are caused by sprite rules, plan rules or source code files.

Version 2.1.8 includes a number of user-requested features such as sorting all lists and minimum counter values, as well as a number of improvements to the framework code to improve flexibility in affecting sprites, among other things. Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sgdk2/files/sgdk2/2.1.8/

Scrolling Game Development Kit 2.1.6 is mostly an update to keep up with current technologies: Windows 7, the latest Sandcastle Help File Builder, Visual C# 2010 Express and .NET 4.0. Details of all the updates in this release are available in the newly updated online version of the SGDK2 documentation. See http://sgdk2.sourceforge.net/Documentation/html/344ca14d-b435-4a1f-b94d-6640f99096ce.htm

Scrolling Game Development Kit version 2.1.4 provides some framework flexibility improvements, including the significant improvements of allowing all plans and sprites to inherit from a user-specified base class, as well as some minor fixes and improvements in the IDE itself. http://sgdk2.sf.net/

Minor enhancements (such as a real-time sorted tree view), updates (OpenTK version 1.0) and bug fixes are included in the latest version of this IDE designed for novice game developers. Discuss at http://gamedev.enigmadream.com/

Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 is a .Net based IDE for developing 2D scrolling games. The IDE runs under Windows, and as of version 2.1, there is limited support for running the generated games under Linux with Mono. The IDE can generate functional games and Visual Studio (and MonoDevelop) projects without the need to write code.

In release 2.1.2, many miscellaneous updates accumulated over the past few months during beta testing have been incorporated into the release, and the latest versions of the OpenTK and FMOD libraries have been included. With this release, the beta status is being removed, and subsequent releases will likely not go through beta status any more.... read more

Version 2.1 of Scrolling Game Development Kit includes many large updates and enhancements. The biggest is perhaps the switch to OpenGL, which has already demonstrated promise for being able to port the program the the games created with it to Linux (although more friendly support for this is yet to come). For more detail, refer to this complete list of notable updates and features:
1. Upgrade to .NET 2.0: SGDK2 and the projects it generates now rely on .NET Framework version 2.0 and take advantage of new features added in this version. The SGDK2 Project itself requires Visual C# 2008 or .NET 3.0 to compile, but can run on any system that has .NET Framework 2.0. It also knows how to compile game projects on any system with .NET 2.0.
2. OpenGL Framework: Version 2.0 was based on Managed DirectX. SGDK 2.1 uses the OpenTK library to access the OpenGL interface to video hardware, allowing SGDK2 and the projects created with it to potentially be more easily ported to other platforms. This also provided an apparent significant performance boost.
3. Improved Message Functions: Displaying messages is now an integrated function in SGDK2 instead of a custom object. Furthermore, it now uses a tileset as the font instead of using the font support provided by the system. This means that you can use graphics and animated tiles/characters in your messages. A new message preview window is provided to assist in laying out the message at design time.
4. Frame Rate Limit: If your game runs too fast on some systems, you can now use the LimitFrameRate function to control the speed.
5. Cut Rules: It's now possible to cut a group of rules when using a rule editor. This can also be used to delete hierarchies of rules.
6. Upgrade Documentation: This help file is now being built with Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder instead of NDOC because NDOC did not support .NET 2.0. As a result the build process is somewhat simplified and the content is better linked, among other improvements.
7. Implement ability to convert rules to functions: Sprite Rules and Plan rules can now be converted to functions in custom code objects that can be called with a single rule and edited in the code editor.
8. Implement ability to create sprites from templates using a pop-up menu from the new command (based on templates in the library, which you're free to expand and share by exporting your own templates).
9. Implement ability to call sprite functions from plan rules.
10. Upgrade to FMOD stable release 4.20.06.

The release of version 2 of Scrolling Game Development Kit is official. See the details at http://sgdk2.sf.net/release

Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 is nearing readiness for the first official release. This release contains a few fixes since the last beta release, and unless serious bugs are found, may represent the functionality of the actual release.

A number of issues have been found in the initial beta and have been fixed in this second beta release. Some of the more significant fixes include:
* Some fixes to the way sprites react to solids under certain conditions
* Sizing of the player options dialog for 1-player games
* Probems with frame tweening wizard
* Problems with the Layer Wizard
* Improvement in the way the map editor previews the effect of placing a tile
* Improve the tile animation preview window
* Fix a problem that caused games and the IDE's map editor to hang on exit under certain conditions
* Improve the behavior of the dropdown list of tiles in the tileset editor
* Fix the alpha mask preview in the sprite definition editor when viewing rectangular masks (alpha=0) on frames that are offset
* Improved support for accessing the last created sprite
* New tutorial for working with sounds and music

A site for downloading and submitting content for SGDK2 has been launched at http://sgdk2.enigmadream.com/. Hosted here will be finished games, game source code, and template files with importable content, all search-able, sortable and rateable thanks to Joomla and ReMOSitory.

A project demonstrating how isometric view games can be created in SGDK2 has been posted in the project's default download page. See IsoSample: http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=152001&sel_platform=4313

Scrolling Game Development Kit 2.0 has released the first beta release today. The release includes comprehensive UI documentation, coding documentation and tutorials to assist users in learning the drastically new environment, a complete rewrite since the last version 1 release more than 2 years ago. We're still looking for more help in maintaining the web site or porting the code to alternate platforms. http://sgdk2.sf.net/