News

SDL is the core library that we are using to display graphics, load images and play sounds. This basically means this game would not exist without it. Right now our team is working on porting Tux Football to SDL 2.0, which was released this week.

We won't bore you with the details of this transition, but you can find the changes in our Git repositories. The changes might also be interesting for other projects using sfont, which was ported to SDL 2 by our development team.

Our team is proud to announce the latest Tux Football release. It features many things requested by users and also by the development team.

Translations

Until now it was impossible to translate Tux Football to another language. This release adds the german translation and the ability to translate Tux Football to any other language. Currently this only works on Linux, but we are working on translations for the Windows version as well.

Goalie avatar

This release add distinct goalie avatar, so that the goalie can be distinguished from the other players.

We are still working on the model, but the code is in place to make use of it!

Other

We fixed a bug where scores were not handled correct.

We improved logging to console adding a simple but very usable API to the code. It can be enabled using the command line parameter "-d"

Now go and download the latest version.

It's been a month since we released 0.3.0 of Tux Football. According to the download statistics more than 500 downloads have been counted. This is quite a number for a little project like Tux Football. We are currently working towards a 0.3.1 release containing some minor bugfixes and some exciting new features. Stay tuned for further updates.

We are proud to announce the 0.3.0 release of Tux Football.

You are wondering what changed since the last release? Well, the main focus of this release is to enhance the ingame graphics. Updated player models, update ingame UI elements, even an updated graphic for the ball. Our graphics department made some really good progress and we want to share this with you.

So go ahead an download the latest release. Right now we offer the following downloads:

• Ubuntu/Debian based system (64bit only)
• Windows Installer
• Windows Standalone ZIP
• the sources to build the game yourself

Have fun playing!

Note: This is a rather technical new entry

Our design team is mainly using blender to create the player model. As you might already know Blender offeres great capabilities of animating an object like our player using a really powerful bones system. But we need to export the animation to be used in the game. So on the one hand we have a Blender animation and on the other hand we need lots of images to be used by the game. How do we connect these different worlds?

Rendering the result

First of all we need to render the result. As the game allows 8 directions we need to render each animation in each of the perpectives. Here is an example for the standing animation:

This animation is the standing animation which has only one frame (e.g. one image). While it is not very complex to render the model in each of the perpectives for one frame, it is impossible to do this for longer animations like the walking animation which has 48 frames. So how do we solve this issue?

Batch rendering

So basically we need to batch this operation. Blender allows to render many frames at once using the commandline. The following command would render the running animation:

blender -b player.blend -o walking -s 10 -e 49 -a

• Change the color of the players clothing between red and blue
• Rotate the player using the Blender python API
• Render each animation to its directory

Result

The result is that our graphics team can now update the player model in Blender and we can trigger a build process of all animations. This is really great stuff and was actually quite fun to implement. Feel free to use this script for your project, too (as long as you follow the GPL-2 license).

Happy hacking

We are proud to present the first bunch of graphics updates is done. This includes the following:

• Both player teams
• The standing, walking, running and tackling animations
• The player markers (pointing to where the current player is)
• The ball plus its shadow
• The score and time display

So if you are wondering what the game looks like now we can show you this boring screenshot:

We are aiming towards a release soon but right now we are still missing a few animations (including new ones).

Don't worry. We'll keep you updated.

Right now we are working on improving the overall graphics of the game. We want to keep the unique look of tuxfootball while bringing the graphics to a new level. After discussing what to do next we thought it would be best to tackle the biggest part of the graphical improvement, the player.

The image above shows the newly created player model from our graphics department. It was created using Blender within a few hours. It is not yet textured but already completely rigged and we are working on creating good animations. One major difference to the current graphics is that the shadow is integrated within the same image, which allows a shadow that actually matches the players movement (right now the shadow is the same image for every position).

Stay tuned for further updates.

Right now Tux Football is used 2 fonts provided by the SFont library we use. These fonts were way to different to use them as "selected" and "not selected" fonts (different font width, different look, etc.). Our graphics department started looking into how to create a font for SFont. The format is simple but a bit obscure (you can read about it at http://nostatic.org/sfont/ or http://www.linux-games.com/sfont/). Right now we got a really improved font face but it is not perfect yet (spacing between the letters is inconsistent). Nonetheless we want to show of the progress here:

Our graphics department did not stop there. We thought about a goal and time display during the game. We did not actually implement anything but it will most likely look something like the following:

We moved the website from a single static HTML file to a simple CMS named Enticore. It's not as full blown as Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, etc. but it offeres the features we need with a minimal overhead.

We moved the code of Tux Football from SVN to GIT (even keeping the history). For everyone interested in the reasons I recommend reading Why Git is Better than X

We add usage of mulitple data path to Tux Football. That means now Tux Football does no longer use a single data path. For example you can now have /usr/share/tuxfootball and ~/.tuxfootball/data as data directories. This should easily allow mod creation of Tux Football.

We are currently in the process of moving the code from CVS to SVN which offers a nice feature over CVS: moving files while keeping their history. There are ways to do that with CVS to, but SVN handles this natively. Next to that SVN does not commit file oriented but repository oriented.

I (Tenk) will continue the good work of Jason, english is not my primary language, please apologies me for the futur :).

It took me a little longer than I had hoped, but the refactoring of the states is now complete. Ok, the ingame submodes need to be sorted out but other than that it's all good. I shall be committing in the next day or two.

I have also integrated some changes made by Shard, who is currently helping compile Tuxfootball on BeOS. Cool stuff!

Well, it's been a while since I did any real development on Tux football, but since I keep recieving the odd encouraging mail, I believe it's time to make a start :-) First thing I did was look at the code and scream - there are some pretty hideous bits of design in there, especially to do with the state logic in gameengine.cpp, so I have spent the day performing, hmmm, how shall we put it, a little bit of refactoring.

And since a number of people are helping out, I have added a mailing list to track the development of tux football. You can subscribe here : http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tuxfootball-devel