Back on track!

After a hiatus, Stellar continues its development. We recently opened this new website with a refreshing look.
The development of the IDE is going well. Our main goal is to have a usable product and extend from there. The script editor is one of our main goals for now. We've been working on it to perform as expected, so if you are used to other editors, like Sublime Text, you won't feel lost. Having a comfortable coding experience is a priority, after having the Stellar's coding side solved, everything will be automating tasks for the end user.
The tools are going to work with different views. You will be able to see the source code of the file you are editing (xml, ini, json) or you can display it as a simple UI. So you don't need to learn how to edit them using a text editor.

There are still many things to hack so
Let's get started!
Emilio Coppola.

Bad/Good News

Bad news :(

I have been very busy and I will continue to be for some time. I won't be able to work on the Stellar GUI on a couple of months. If anyone is interested in contributing and is lost, please contact me, I can update you on what has to be done. coppolaemilio@gmail.com

Good news!

opon4 continues working on the awesome SGE so you should be following the project progress on stellarengine.nongnu.org. He will be updating often and preparing a set of separated tools for game development that will help de game development.


Hugs and wish to be back soon!

Emilio Coppola.

SGE 0.4.0 + Diaspora account

Hi there, onpon4 here once again.

I don't know much about what's going on with the GUI, hopefully Emilio will post an update of that soon. I'm still working on the room editor.

In any case, I've released version 0.4.0 of SGE. You can find it at http://stellarengine.nongnu.org. There's a WHATSNEW file distributed with it now, so read that for a detailed list of changes, but these are the most notable changes:

• Added methods for saving screenshots.
• Added simple modal dialog boxes.
• Reworked how speaker balance is controlled for sounds and music.
• Collision detection is now much more efficient (the new method is twice as fast as the old method).
• Better documentation provided in HTML rather than plaintext (generated with Sphinx).

 In other news, I've opened a Diaspora account for Stellar. Its ID is stellarpython@diasp.eu. I don't know how important it will end up being, but for now I'm posting updates there when they happen.

I'll try to finish the room editor as quickly as I can. It's taking longer than it should because it's not a fun experience (mostly because I still haven't gotten it to a runnable state; getting something to run is a lot less fun than improving something that already runs), but since I need the damn thing, I'll finish it. Once it's ready, I'll be distributing the room editor alongside another script as a set of tools to help develop games with SGE, as a more minimal alternative to the full GUI Emilio and the others are working on.

First Beta Release of Stellar Game Engine (And an alpha of Stellar itself coming soon)!

Hello, this is onpon4 again, with important news regarding Stellar.

In the past few months since I released the first (and now, it seems, only) alpha version of the Stellar Game Engine (SGE), after being stuck on a bug for a month or so, I managed to crush all bugs (I think), finish implementing all the features of SGE with Pygame, write an example Pong game, and write a proper API reference for SGE. In addition, over the past few days, I created a project page for SGE on Savannah, and you can find the homepage for it here:

http://www.nongnu.org/stellarengine/

The page is kind of boring right now, but it works.

From now on, I would prefer to do the development of SGE on Savannah, although I will continue to push changes to GitHub, so please go there for things like getting involved with the code and reporting bugs (you can still use GitHub if you are having trouble with Savannah, but I want to phase out the usage of GitHub with SGE).

Just to be clear: this applies only to SGE, not to Stellar itself. Currently, development of Stellar itself is still being done on GitHub. I don't know if Emilio plans to continue to develop on GitHub, or move to SourceForge, or what, but currently that's all still on GitHub.

Now, for what this post is mainly about: today, SGE gets its first beta release, 0.2.0. At this point, SGE is completely usable, for any type of 2D game that Game Maker can be used for, and I think it's bug-free. It's not very good on its own for anything that requires level editing, such as platformers; for that, you're probably better off waiting for the Stellar GUI to be finished, but it's very usable for games such as Pong and 1943 which don't need the room editor (a Pong example is included with it at the moment, and I am working on a "1945" example).

You can download the new beta version of SGE (0.2.0) here: http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/stellarengine/

Stellar itself (i.e. the GUI) will probably see its first alpha release pretty soon as well, though I don't know exactly when.

In addition to working on 1945, I am also putting together some video tutorials showing how to write a Pong game and explaining the basics of SGE, since I know that there are some (like me) who don't like reading long manuals. I have the first two parts recorded (they just need to be edited) and I'll start uploading the videos to my gobblin.se account as I finish editing them (hopefully I'll get at least the first part done tomorrow).

Happy hacking!

Stellar Game Engine gets its first alpha release!

Hello there! This is onpon4 writing again, except this time, it might come as a surprise to Emilio and Adman.

I have bundled what is in the Git repo for the Stellar Game Engine (SGE) into a ZIP archive to release it as the first alpha version of SGE. I haven't been able to talk much about this with the others, so for now, I've uploaded it to MediaFire. You can download it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?coderv6a9246g6c

In case the question is floating around in your head, I don't think another alpha release of the GUI is going to coincide with this alpha release of the engine. It wouldn't make sense right now because the GUI doesn't actually use the engine yet, mostly because there are still a lot of things missing and a lot of fixes to the interface itself needed. But I'm releasing this early alpha of SGE so you can see some of its progress. Already it is powerful enough for a decent Pong game, and a basic example showing off some of the features is included.

Cheers!

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

Hello Stellar family!

We'd like to wish you Merry Christmas, to get all the presents you wished, but mainly to be with your family and with people you love. Also Happy New Year 2013. We hope it will be better than 2012 :)

The New Direction

Hello there, this is onpon4 instead of Emilio making the blog post today.

 Just want to let you know that we're not dead, and we're moving forward, and I also want to let you know what's been going on.

About a week ago, I proposed a new development method for Stellar: rather than putting everything into one program, we will split it into two parts: Stellar, which is the GUI, and Stellar Game Engine (a.k.a. "SGE" or simply "Stellar Engine"), which is the engine used by games that Stellar exports as a library. This has some great advantages:

• The code generated by Stellar will be much more easy to understand. While Pygame is easy to understand when you know it, it is also very low-level, and as a result, the resulting code may look confusing to many users of Stellar. This way, generated code can be made to look almost exactly like what is shown in the GUI.
• Stellar will be much easier to develop and maintain, in particular because the GUI will not need to worry about translation of Pygame into something more intuitive for game development; the engine will handle this.
• This will allow Stellar to easily be modified for use with other graphics libraries, such as Pyglet. In fact, it could easily enough support both Python and Pyglet, allowing for greater flexibility. This would be much more difficult to do with the current scheme.

In addition, it is possible for Stellar Game Engine to be used standalone as a powerful game engine, for anyone who does not feel the need for the GUI, which is another very neat bonus. It will also be much easier for game developers to customize the engine since they won't need to wade through the GUI code of Stellar.

There is a GitHub page for SGE here, and in the past week I have completed a template for SGE "implementations" to follow:

https://github.com/Coppolaemilio/StellarGameEngine

There is also a wiki page. It is a bit out of date, because I wrote it around the time I proposed the idea, and hence it is incomplete. I would greatly appreciate anyone helping to improve the wiki page. You can find it here:

https://github.com/Coppolaemilio/Stellar/wiki/Stellar-Game-Engine

Currently, I am more or less working on SGE and the baseline implementation of SGE, written with Pygame, while Emilio and Adman continue to work on Stellar itself.

Emilio wanted me to mention: one of the ongoing tasks with the Stellar GUI is rewriting the code so that it displays correctly on all platforms; currently, much of it uses absolute positioning based on Windows. If you have any knowledge of using PyQt or Qt in general, help is certainly appreciated. Any small contribution reduces the work load by a little bit.

Let's do this!

EDIT: After I submitted this post, Emilio mentioned that a new icon design is planned. If you have any designs to offer, feel free to share them.

EDIT 2: I can't believe I forgot this. We started an IRC channel. It's #stellar on irc.freenode.net. Feel free to talk about Stellar there!