Great news for everybody interested in FLOSS Gaming and Game development: FOSDEM 2012 will host a devroom centered on the development of Free and Open Source Games!

So what is FOSDEM? Quoting from their homepage, FOSDEM is probably the largest free and non-commercial open source event, taking place in Brussels, Belgium on 4 and 5 February 2012.

We (which means fellow devs from various game-related projects) agreed to apply for a room during the Summer of Code mentor summit and the application was accepted. Our devroom thus takes place on Sunday, February 5th, 09:00 - 17:00 in room AW1.120.

Facts delivered, now on to the important part: You want to present your topic to the whole world (or at least a subset of it)? Go apply as a speaker until December 23rd, 23:00 GMT+1! You cannot participate, but still have a nice topic idea? Post it to the list (see below)!

For more information, check out the announcement post on the official devroom mailing list – and make sure to subscribe to that list.

See you at FOSDEM, 
Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya!

On OCT 6, FIFE team released version 0.3.3 of their engine that is the machine room of Unknown Horizons (official release announcement). We found some minor issues, but be assured FIFE did an awesome job there! A lot of things troubling UH performance before have seen huge improvements: general amount of draw calls, image loading, building area highlights, minimap drawing, rect selections, and so on. Thanks for everything!

So what's our plan now? We eagerly wait for the bugfix release 0.3.3r2 scheduled in few days and then ship all those improvements to everybody interested with Unknown Horizons 2011.3!

Should you want to play with those new features of both FIFE and UH earlier than most others, make sure to follow our beta tester mailing list. We regularly announce fresh release candidate packages and win installers there. Subscribe: UH-Beta. Issues can be reported through the usual communication channels IRC, forums, mail and so on.

Share your feedback to help us improving Unknown Horizons even further! :-)

Hey Folks,

maybe some of you already realized it, but let's still start with good news again: We replaced all of our non-free content in the master branch! :)

Many non-free graphics were substituted by even prettier assets, for a few units we are using placeholders right now. Replacing our whole unit base is not to be measured in days ;-)

Since our sounds partially were sampled using tracks originating in freesound, we had to replace most of them as well. You will notice e.g. a new bell for this reason. The sounds used for the lumberjack were kindly relicensed by hazure.

So the great work of inken and manthus over the last months finally paid off - our release will not contain anything in conflict with DFSG licenses. This especially means that we can use any help with packaging you are able to offer! If you are interested in building an official package for your favorite distribution: visit us on IRC, drop a message on our mailing list or post at our forums. We will get back to you!

Additionally, you are now able to listen to three brand new and awesome music tracks by novatlan ingame as well as on our media page. Make sure to check them out!

Your team of Unknown Horizons

After quite a while of individual work and development, we decided to have regular meetings again in order to manage and organise the tasks more efficiently.

The new jour fixe is every sunday at 18:00 GMT+1h (CET) at the IRC-channel, interested users and developers with or without great ideas or much or few time are very welcome!

Here's a short overview of our last meeting at 27th of February:

The full logs of the meeting are available here.

So far with for the update, see you on sunday!

After a long period of buggy installations and errors without an end we finally got it. Our new shiny and well working Pootle Server is up and running.

Templates now work as we want them to work so translation should get much easier for almost everyone, those that want to help us translating and us at getting the translations to show up ingame.

Unfortunately we could not get the old user database to work after migrating our current pootle system to a new database system and a whole new version of pootle. But registration is a quick process.

Pootle registration / UH main translation /  UH tutorial project

Hope to see you there soon and with regards
Your Unknown-Horizons Team

Heya,

we still try to give feedback on a way more regular basis, so here comes right another update. It has already been two weeks since our last entry!

Merging master

In case you remember me writing about the new tile set structure: it is still under development. Because we want to release UH 2011.1 anytime soon, we merged all features of the dev branch into master (with the old maps still being playable there) and plan to fully implement the new tile set in 2011.2.

The only bugs we found so far with the merge were related to the boat builder, which is a rather nice quota for merging more than 200 commits into a branch that had its own commits in many files as well. We would like to encourage anybody: Please test and report bugs you encounter, else we possibly cannot fix them!

Replacing content that's not free enough™

Who has not fiddled around with this funny, funny topic of licensing? Sometimes it just is not enough to willingly fulfill all conditions the creator asks for through the license — it's still considered not free by distributions we would love to see UH packages shipped with.

In our particular case, the whole bunch of animated human units is affected (provided by Reiner's tileset which is covered by his own Freeware license). We even consider a separate "very free" release version of UH with fancy black CC0-boxes instead of cute podgy inhabitants. This might attract contributors if they *really* see what we are missing.

Opinions welcome: Would you appreciate such an additional release version or do you see it as unnecessary workload?

Another issue comes up with our sounds. There are a few sound effects which we sampled from tracks obtained through freesound.org. Sadly, their CC-Sampling+ won't make it into Debian, so we need replacements here, too. hazure was kind enough to put the work we use under CC-BY-SA 3.0 as well, but I fear that not everybody is that lucky. Props for doing us this great favor!

Google Summer of Code 2011

Now on to the most important news of this entry: We decided to apply for this year's Summer of Code. What are our expectations? Well, of course we hope to get accepted, gaining new coders and trying our best to keep them with our project after GSoC ended. But even if the application is not successful, we still made ourselves clear what we would like to work and be worked on in the next rough 6 to 9 months.

The preparations for applying are a rather large task and I work on this for almost three weeks now. Collecting and sharpening ideas for our students, preparing mentors for their task and setting up the overall infrastructure is nearly finished by now. The current plans are to set us a limit of four student applicants at most. We are a small organisation and as such won't try to take care of ten students. It is simply not going to work – and not fair to mentors and mentees alike if there is not enough time to properly answer questions and be a guidance ;-)

If you by any chance are interested in working with us this summer (and longer of course): Visit us on IRC, introduce yourself, try to get familiar with the tools we use and you are likely to be recognised when it comes to selecting students. A good start for that would be the next public meeting in our channel, which is currently scheduled for Sunday 14:00 UTC+0.

So … coming to an end, I'll just copy several old lines and add something new:

Not only are graphic artists needed, even playtesting users, evolving into professional bug hunters, are of invaluable help. For new features, we also need requests and thoughts about how they could look like. Feel free to throw anything in our channel or bugtracker – and be assured that we will evaluate it!

Help wanted:

• 3D-modelling, urgent need ;-)
• playtesting and balancing, can be done by everybody
• animation, human models

Of course, if you are an interested programmer or have something different in mind, we can also make use of anything you work on – we are not only open to students that want to join the team! If you are a C++ developer, you might also consider lending our engine FIFE a helping hand. We directly profit from any performance gain.

Regards
Your team of Unknown Horizons

Translations

Testing

Today we introduce http://status.unknown-horizons.org.

There you will find the most recent updates and informations about upgrades, updates or any other issues concerning anything of Unknown-Horizons. If there are some technical problems with anything that belongs to our project you will find informations about it there.

*Update* See left panel, we now use the twitter account uhorizonstech instead.

Regards