FlatRedBall

Yay! Another monthly release!

What’s new you ask? Well, on the code side a few things. First, all FlatSilverBall bugs that have been reported have been fixed. This includes positioning bugs related to changing the Camera’s Orthogonal values, Text colors being wacky, and Sprite flipping not working. We’ve also significantly reduced the amount of memory allocation that’s done on a per-frame basis in FSB, so your applications should run smoother.

We’ve again focused on more UI improvements this month, fixing up and adding more features to the PropertyGrid, ObjectDisplayManager, and ListDisplayWindow. Automatically-generated UI has never been easier to use.

But the big changes this month come in the tools, specifically the TileEditor. We’ve gotten good feedback on how to improve the TileEditor and we are very pleased with this month’s improvements. If you’re working on a tile-based game, we strongly encourage you to upgrade. And of course, as always keep the feedback coming so that November’s release can address your most important requests.

Thanks for everyone’s involvement this last month. We have a very large change list and a very active community. Oh, and speaking of which, we hope that everyone’s enjoying the new forums as well.

We’re hard at work overhauling the front page blog, so soon we’ll have that style matching the forum style, and comments will be re-enabled.

Good luck making games, all!

–Vic–

The forum was up and down for the last little while. We now have it up, it feels stable, I think uploads are working, and I’ve tweaked the theme. Thanks to Rory and Somjade in helping me with the tweaking and graphics, and thanks to Terry for getting things set up.

What’s next? Well, if you visit the forums now you’ll notice that it doesn’t have the top bar with the links to the rest of the site. That’s coming soon.

Please let us know how you feel about the new site. I’m personally pretty excited with what it opens up.

–Vic–

It’s pretty interesting to compare how frequently we update the engine (usually at least once a month) to how frequently we update the website (I think the last was 4 years ago). We’ve been wanting to make some changes for quite a while, but now it’s finally time.

First we’ll be upgrading the forums, moving from PHPBB 2 to 3. From what I’ve read, 3 brings a lot of new features like a personal file storage, blog integration, and enhanced spam control.

Terry is working on the forums starting now, so we apologize if there is any downtime. We hope the upgrade goes quickly and results in a better site for all.

–Vic–

The team at X10 studio (http://www.x10studio.com/) have just released a new trailer for their game made in FRB called Trashman:

This is the most advanced FRB game I’ve seen to date. They are definitely paving the way for future games by reporting bugs, requesting features, and providing a lot of inspiration.

This game runs fully in FRB. Levels were created in the SpriteEditor, characters in the AnimationEditor, effects in the ParticleEditor, and level collision in the PolygonEditor.

Great job X10 team. Keep up the fantastic work!

–Vic–