[The E]

As you may have noticed, we've finally released FSOpen 3.7.2. This has been a long time in the making, and we're glad to finally be able to call it done.

Now, on to the future. Going forward, there will be a bunch of changes in the way the SCP operates on a technical level, and it's time that we officially announce them. Most of this will not be news to those of you who hang out in the #scp IRC channel. So, here we go then.

Starting now, the SCP github repository will be the lead development platform.
We decided on this because while SVN is fine for some of our work, git is better in so many ways that a switch has long been overdue. Also, a bunch of us are already using git for their personal projects, and merging stuff from git into svn is a pain. The repository can be found here, as well as an easy-to-use git client to get the code.

Also effective immediately, we will be dropping support for Windows 98
Going forward, there will be fewer restrictions on C++ language features. Some will still need to be applied because of the need to target Windows XP, and thus the need to stick to features cleanly supported by Visual Studio 2013 and, if possible, Visual Studio 2010.

Now that we got the boring management stuff out of the way, let's look at the features that will be coming up in the near future.

First up, we will merge the work done in the SDL Everywhere branch into the mainline. This will allow us to consolidate the codebase and reduce the number of cases where the Windows code and the Linux/MacOS/Unix code diverge.
Next, Swifty's and Valathil's work in refactoring our render engine. We've all been wowed by the enhancements they made, and soon we'll be able to bring that work into the mainline releases.
But games are not just pretty graphics, they also need good sound, and for the longest time, that aspect has fallen by the wayside. However, in recent months, jg18 has been digging through our sound code to make it much better, and just as PBR will make everything look more consistent, his work will make everything sound more consistent too.
There are also other projects going on, but they're definitely more in the experimental stage. m|m has been doing some good exploratory work here, prototyping support for TrueType fonts, SVG images and integrated web browsers. While there is no timeline for this, expect these to show up again.

Obviously, I can't give you a concrete deadline for the next stable release. I mean, I could, obviously, but we all know how much of a folly that would be.
But I for one am definitely excited for what's going to happen, and I hope you are too.

See you in the future!

[niffiwan]

whoot!

* niffiwan disables his svn to git repo sync script

[Luis Dias]

Good night and good luck!

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Yayification!

[Zacam]

And for anybody on XP that needs to run 2010 but is having problems finding a copy within their means, send me a PM. Depending on how many SCP Dev's there are that need it, I may well be able to swing some for non-SCP devs as well.

[Fury]

Not intending to start any kind of flame war, but genuinely asking why does SCP still need to support WinXP going forward? XP-hardware is already so outdated that they wouldn't be able to enjoy most of new content released by modders. And they can keep using latest WinXP-compatible release for as long as they want. XP userbase is also very small these days, almost everyone have moved on to Win7 and newer. In the last HLP hardware and OS survey, exactly one person out of 77 uses XP.

[The E]

According to surveys like this one, XP still has an appreciable market share, certainly a larger one than Windows 8. That's one reason. The other is that XP support doesn't cost us anything, Visual Studio 2015 for example still supports XP as a build target out of the box.

[karajorma]

Not intending to start any kind of flame war, but genuinely asking why does SCP still need to support WinXP going forward? XP-hardware is already so outdated that they wouldn't be able to enjoy most of new content released by modders. And they can keep using latest WinXP-compatible release for as long as they want. XP userbase is also very small these days, almost everyone have moved on to Win7 and newer. In the last HLP hardware and OS survey, exactly one person out of 77 uses XP.

As I said on the internal, Its not actually true that few people use it. Here in China for instance XP is so popular that there are serious issues surrounding the fact that MS are no longer supporting it. And once TrueType fonts are in I'd like to see if I could get Chinese translations up and running cause I know quite a few gamers over here but I can't get them to play cause their English is only so-so or worse.

[Swifty]

Expect a very large commit of the reworked renderer with soft shadows and deferred lighting in trunk. Shortly after I fix a bug niffiwan reported with nameplates being rendered weirdly in nebula missions.

Soon.

[BirdofPrey]

How much work is converting the ton of textures for PBR builds?


I do hope someone looks at the interface out of mission though.  I had some stuff I had been working on (doing a higher resolution and widescreen mission briefing screen based on the old FS1 one for FSPort)  till I was told higher resolution assets weren't supported.

[Colonol Dekker]

No more windows 98?

* Colonol Dekker can no longer play.

[Luis Dias]

Ah so you were the other one!

[Yarn]

Now that Git is the main repository, shouldn't posts 3 and 5 of the Master Sticky be updated (since they're now outdated)?

And once TrueType fonts are in I'd like to see if I could get Chinese translations up and running cause I know quite a few gamers over here but I can't get them to play cause their English is only so-so or worse.

I've actually been thinking of starting an effort at around that same time to add Unicode support to FSO. That should allow support for most of the world's major languages, including Chinese.

[headdie]

Interesting stuff and most of it really exciting

[m!m]

I've actually been thinking of starting an effort at around that same time to add Unicode support to FSO. That should allow support for most of the world's major languages, including Chinese.

Supporting UTF-8 is actually quite easy: https://github.com/asarium/fs2open.github.com/tree/feature/utf8
It may cause issues with mods using custom fonts though.

[Goober5000]

No more windows 98?

* Colonol Dekker can no longer play.

I believe The E was creating a false equivalence between a) lifting the restrictions against C++11 and b) dropping support for Win98.  One does not necessarily lead to the other.

And regardless, I will post a Win98-compatible build of 3.7.2 Final this evening.

I've actually been thinking of starting an effort at around that same time to add Unicode support to FSO. That should allow support for most of the world's major languages, including Chinese.

I have a local branch work-in-progress which adds full support for SCP_string to the mission and table parsing code (that is, it converts Mission_text from a char array to a SCP_string).  I can finish that up and commit it as a first step.

[potterman28wxcv]

As a heavy user of git, I completely approve this decision. Your life is going to change guys 

[AdmiralRalwood]

To be more precise, the SCP as a whole will no longer guarantee FSO will run on Windows 98. That isn't exactly the same thing as the code spontaneously no longer compiling for Windows 98.

Anyone who wants to can, of course, compile builds of FSO that run on Windows 98 (and possibly without needing to remove C++11 code). Even if nobody wants to do that, the older builds won't cease to exist.

[Yarn]

I've actually been thinking of starting an effort at around that same time to add Unicode support to FSO. That should allow support for most of the world's major languages, including Chinese.

Supporting UTF-8 is actually quite easy: https://github.com/asarium/fs2open.github.com/tree/feature/utf8
It may cause issues with mods using custom fonts though.

Proper Unicode support requires more than just basic storage and manipulation. For example, there's the issue with case-insensitive comparisons: The stricmp() function doesn't work properly with Unicode text, so some other method is needed. (And remember that Unicode's repertoire is vast, with hundreds or possibly even thousands of characters having case mappings.) The code also needs to be able to detect the encoding of files; simply looking for a byte-order mark isn't sufficient because files without one may or may not use a Unicode encoding. (Remember, support for both Windows-1252 and Windows-1250 is needed for retail compatibility.)

And that's just the tip of the massive iceberg that is the Unicode Standard. Fortunately, libraries like the International Components for Unicode (ICU) should make Unicode support much easier and simpler to implement. Lots of changes to FSO's code would still be necessary, though, since it's littered with things like the "1 byte = 1 character" assumption and the use of functions that don't handle Unicode text properly.

[Arkblade]

unicode support? i'd hear good news.
in fact, japanese translations are finished many years ago. (around started SCP)
that texts port to SCP are make good test data.