FoFiX 4.0.0 Development Thread

[Lysdestic]

Hey This is already dead?

Yes

Bit quick eh, you could have waited until an actual dev posted instead of saying something.

Well, it more or less is. Even with Weirdpeople (<3, yo!) doing some work, the fact is the game hasn't seen any significant development or releases in a long time. Most of the central team has moved on, and rhythm gaming itself is a dying fad.

It's sad but it's true.

[amak11]

Tis much is true.

[Lorddavo3]

Well reading between the lines it looks like some people have picked up the development of this game again which makes me happy to no end. Good luck guys and if you drop it at least let the community know. Unlike the last time. But once again Good Luck.

[weirdpeople]

Well i mean i dont want FoFiX to go away, i refuse to touch the current code anymore. So my solution is write something from scratch and it will get there eventually. :P
It will be open sourced once i feel the code is cleaner, and things are more complete, and it supports platforms other than windows. At which point other people can help.

So i just made a quick video showing off something awesome i made.

It allows me to modify a source file as a program is running, and then the changes will be loaded and used immediately in your program.

Shows a bit of the framework, and that kind of stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQCxnQrIms

Framework is coming along slow as always, but once it gets to a good point i can take it and start on something. So basically we need texturing and input done, which shouldn't be so far off.

[Dj Ram]

Well i mean i dont want FoFiX to go away, i refuse to touch the current code anymore. So my solution is write something from scratch and it will get there eventually. :P
It will be open sourced once i feel the code is cleaner, and things are more complete, and it supports platforms other than windows. At which point other people can help.

So i just made a quick video showing off something awesome i made.

It allows me to modify a source file as a program is running, and then the changes will be loaded and used immediately in your program.

Shows a bit of the framework, and that kind of stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQCxnQrIms

Framework is coming along slow as always, but once it gets to a good point i can take it and start on something. So basically we need texturing and input done, which shouldn't be so far off.

Do you have like a news letter or google+ so I can keep up with what you're doing? Would love to see something amazing for Ubuntu or even for android.

[MichauDotCom]

Holy macaroni, it's alive!

[mykehdoom]

I think this project died.. =/

[blazingamer]

I think this project died.. =/

Everyone says that every couple of months, and yeah, interest is kind of at a stand still. I went and refactored a bit of code and shoved everything into packages so now things are a bit easier to find and understand how it all fits together, but I didn't go all out yet. There are plenty of tasks in the fofix github that people are free to pick up and do, and with git it's really easy to fork the project and just go. The fact that we were able to have such a big crazy feature and fix like Project Hero before we were even using source repositories is incredible. I'd love to see another crazy thing like that happen, and it'd be so much easier to organize now that we're using git.

Also, one of the ideas I've been bouncing around with myself has been doing a refactoring to plop SFML in the place of pygame since pygame is no longer really supported. There's Python3 bindings of SFML, and I just feel that SFML is just a cleaner feeling, simpler API than SDL based ones. I'm currently working on another one of my games to learn SFML and see if it might actually be worth the effort. If it seems like it is, once I'm done working on this game I'll see what I can do.

We'd benefit quite a bit by being able to strip out a lot of our custom graphics and input code lingering from 2006 when game libraries like SFML didn't really exist or weren't structured well enough to be a viable solution. It'd be great to be able to just not have to worry too much about that kind of code to maintain anymore, allowing us to focus more on the game instead of the engine.

EDIT::
So SFML is kind of a lost 'cause as the python bindings are rather broken in a lot of places and are barely maintained. A better option might just be to use the SDL2 bindings. Whatever the case, as long as code can be cleaned up and taken off our shoulders, it'll help.

[MistTribe]

I guess this officially is dead. =/

[HSPLazerz]

I'm gonna say that I'm positive that this is dead.

Now that we have Phase Shift, most people around here have also transitioned into that, already having many many features that were missing from FoFix.

FoFix provided much fun for a lot of years, so let's have a minute of silence for the almighty FoFix.

[wolferacing]

A project like this is never "dead". The birth of this was possible due to dedicated members who learned python, played around with code 'til their fingers blistered, and created what we know today as FoFiX. All it takes is a few new members to be just as dedicated. It's very possible, we've done it before. It's not a easy road, but it is a fun journey. Instead of calling this project dead why not try to learn some coding skills, grab an issue and try to find a solution to it. It is open source for a reason. An open source game is never dead.

[MistTribe]

It's been over a year and no updates. It's dead. Just face it. =/

[raynebc]

Actually there have been commits as recently as September of last year:
https://github.com/fofix/fofix/commits/master

Until the devs get back to it though, it remains in a state of hiatus.

[L0fka]

It should be dead, don't touch that corpse, phaseshift with it's lan multiplayer support much more superior than any of FoF with mods or FoFiX

[weirdpeople]

Basically for me the fewer working on the project, the less motivation i have to work on it. We haven't really "officially" stopped development, we have just become busy with other stuff college, various other game development projects, etc.

There is still the rewrite code that i also occasionally work on which is still very very early: https://github.com/mdsitton/fofix-rewrite

edit:
And regarding Phase Shift it looks like the project has suffered from some similar problems that FoFiX has gone through. The code apparently from some posts I've seen on their forums is in pretty bad shape for example here is a post i have quoted about the subject.

This is something I have considered for a while but there are a few reasons why I don't think it would help much.

The first is that my code isn't that well notated. Even I often don't know how some of it works and I always have to spend 5-10 minutes figuring out what the code does. So if I was to release the code or have someone else help me I would feel I'd have to always be on hand to constantly explain the code and as such I might as well just write it myself.

Secondly, this was my first coding project and I literally was still reading my C++ for dummies book during the first few months of development. As such there is a load of old code that is quite embarrassing and that still plagues a lot of the game. Instead of fixing this code I've just learnt to live with it and that's just created more bad code. So if I was to release it I'd want to fix all that up beforehand which takes time.

There are a few other reasons that relating to online play and hacking etc. but they can all be overcome in some form or another.

All that said I would really like to work with other programmers. Everything I've done so far has been pretty much solitary. I'm sure I could learn a lot from working with people more experience than myself and if the right thing came up I would like to do that. However, I think I would get more from just starting a new team project rather than having to live with my old code as a constant reminder of how not to do things.

Thanks
David.

The main reason FoFiX has seemed so dead is because we opted to do a huge rewrite of a lot of the code. The major parts remaining are huge tasks. There are also some release breaking bugs that have resulted from those rewrites.

With phase shift they seemed to have opted to keep the bad code around so over there they can still fix bugs and have maintenance releases which makes the project seem somewhat more alive. The current FoFiX current code has diverged/improved so much since the last release that it is hard to even touch the old code. Especially for me since i came to the party after 3.121 was released and well into the development of 4.0.

Also another large demotivational thing for me is that i have learned so much more about python, programming, and OpenGL since starting some other projects, that sometimes it can be painful (even after these rewrites) looking at the code...

Which I hope to in the future take what I'm working on now and use it to actually create an improved FoFiX/music/rhythm game. repo: https://github.com/explosiveduck/cubix