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Author Topic: How is SFML going?  (Read 4762 times)

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Ceylo

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How is SFML going?
« on: December 23, 2017, 03:24:12 pm »
Hello!

I've been following SFML for quite a long time (starting from the 1.4 era) where it was still developed by a few persons before going toward community development around SFML 2. Then I stopped following SFML around summer 2015.

Now I come back slowly to it and I wanted to know how it is going. I have seen a LOT (too much to read everything ;D) of discussions about future topics like SFML 3 and what should come next. But when looking at SFML Git history it looks rather calm, 3 to 10 commits per month. Like if these discussions had no conclusion. Or maybe everything is happening in forks before submission for PR. Or because SFML had fully matured, I don't really know.

So I'd like to hear the impressions from the SFML development community! How does it feel like to you? What are your ambitions for SFML's future?

Ceylo
« Last Edit: December 23, 2017, 03:33:28 pm by Ceylo »
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Hiura

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2018, 05:37:17 pm »
Yes, we have a LOT of (good) ideas for SFML 2.5+/3, but as you mentioned the implementation doesn't follow. I guess most of us (me included) in the "SFML team" have much less time available for SFML and therefore we don't contribute as much as we used to.

But we also lack strong contributions from the community. Yes, we get valuable feedback like bug reports and feature requests, and I'm really grateful to anyone making SFML better, but bugfix or feature implementations are more scarce. It is also obvious that the tasks in front of us are big so without strong collaborations we cannot move forward.

A good place to start for people who want to contribute is, for example, here: https://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=22480.0
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Ceylo

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #2 on: January 04, 2018, 12:50:49 am »
Ok I understand. Focused teamwork would be both interesting from developers (at least I think so) and from SFML’s point of view. From what I understand you need support from Linux and Windows developers and I’m surprised you didnt get help about it since september. I can’t believe there’ve been no such developers active in SFML dev community since that time.

So I’m wondering why you didn’t get support? Nobody is interested in this feature?
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Phanoo

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #3 on: January 04, 2018, 01:47:46 pm »
I'd like to help the dev team but i lack time and i have a slightly different vision compared to the authors. Less minimalistic, more fully-featured. Not a game engine, just more complete interfaces. I think that's what is stopping most people using it for other than little games and experiments. I'm using SFML to make a big sound creation software and it works, but some limitations are painful, like the Text class, far from any modern standards. Or if I want to set a View position relative to its top left corner, heh i need to use setCenter and recalculate (it feels strange and uncomfortable for anything more advanced than centering a camera to the player). Some of SFML initial spirit "code it yourself if you need advanced features" just can't work in real world. A bigger community would probably bring more contributors too...

Don't worry i may look negative but i think SFML is still a nice piece of work. It's just hard to get people working and involved on it because time isn't infinite, and too much good ideas are stopped because of this minimalistic spirit.
« Last Edit: January 04, 2018, 02:43:37 pm by ratatax »

Ceylo

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #4 on: January 05, 2018, 10:16:46 am »
It's just hard to get people working and involved on it because time isn't infinite, and too much good ideas are stopped because of this minimalistic spirit.
So is it because of time or because you disagree with SFML’s spirit or for another reason that you didn’t help on https://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=22480.0 ?

Asking about this specific feature because it seems to be the highest priority among big topics for SFML dev team (at least I guess that’s what « current focus » means).
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Phanoo

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #5 on: January 05, 2018, 05:18:24 pm »
I didnt saw this topic. What's the added value in scancodes when we already have keycodes and event.textEntered ? (sorry if the question sounds noobish)

What stops me is mostly the lack of time. Maybe i'll have more soon !

As a starting point, i'm ok to help about this : https://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=23017.0
« Last Edit: January 05, 2018, 05:21:38 pm by ratatax »

Hiura

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Re: How is SFML going?
« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2018, 10:19:28 pm »
Scancode differ from keycode in that they don't depend on the current keyboard layout. You can therefore save a configuration of scancode binding for your app's actions and share it easily. Text input cannot be used for that as it 1) depends on the layout and 2) depends on the state of some particular keys (e.g. shift). More on them here: https://github.com/SFML/SFML/pull/1235/files/f6d95ce2576bdb7bccf1fc97af2cc69d0e982f55#diff-7fa0f083c484ef5d846ad4160b129c38R161
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