Thor 2.0 released!

[Jesper Juhl]

Go for it!
I've been using git snapshots of your library for a long time and my judgement is that it's more than ready (I know few developers who write as high-quality C++ code as you do).
Fix up any minor issues in a 2.1 release , but just ship the damn thing now as 2.0

[Nexus]

Thanks for the nice feedback again, Jesper

Yes, it's so annoying, I have wanted to release it for such a long time already, but there were always issues (like triangulation bugs) that would come up unexpected, or then I was short on time... And there are still some designs I'm not 100% happy with, but I'd rather change the API slightly after 2.0 than be stuck with bad things for years

[Jesper Juhl]

There will always be bugs. The thing to realise (in my experience) is that there are bugs and then there are show-stopper bugs. You can always ship/release with bugs - that's just how things are. What you don't want is to ship with major show-stopper bugs. And I don't think you are in that risk category

[Nexus]

Took a decent amount of time, but I'm finally able to announce:

Thor 2.0
[-> Download]

Almost everything has changed in the last three years, some parts multiple times. A few examples:

• Input actions to expressively define and combine user input
• Particle affectors, emitters and animations: copy semantics, similar usage, possibility to combine
• Distributions to allow flexible specifications, e.g. of emitter values
• ResourceManager + ResourcePtr -> ResourceCache + shared_ptr -> ResourceHolder + anything
• More vector algebra functions
• Predefined loaders for SFML resources
• String conversion of input keys/mouse buttons/joystick axes
• More flexible color gradients
• A lot of internal optimizations, bugfixes and modernizations
• Outsourced C++ language-level functionality to Aurora
• ...

As mentioned multiple times, I won't maintain a strict API backwards compatibility policy. I thought long about this, and my conclusion was that for Thor users, API quality is my absolute priority; see also my reasoning here.

Anyway, have fun

[Laurent]

I wonder if it took longer than SFML 2

[eXpl0it3r]

Yay!

Congratulation on the release.

[Hapax]

Congratulations! 

[UroboroStudio]

Nice! Good job Nexus! 

[Jesper Juhl]

Congratulations on wrapping up Thor 2.0.
It's a great improvement. Works well. And complements SFML very nicely.

[Nexus]

Thanks for all the nice comments! Also thanks for Laurent's comment

No, really, thank you for all the constructive feedback you've given me in the past years. This thread alone is a great example, so are the dozens of e-mails and private messages. And I truly appreciate the additional services for Thor, like eXpl0it3r's nightly builds or zsbzsb's NetEXT C# port!

Something very interesting for me would be to see how and where Thor is used. It would also show me different use cases, which I can incorporate in future API design. I've seen a few projects here and on GitHub... If you have an example where Thor helps achieve some features in a game or multimedia application, that would be nice to know

[Jesper Juhl]

I don't have code to show you (it's just not ready yet), but I can tell you that Thor has saved me a bunch of time from not having to write my own animation code, giving me an easy way to deal with input remapping and letting me implement some nice particle effects in a couple of hours rather than days. And more.
I hope to finish my little game project before my 40'th birthday (in april) and although it probably won't be open source (initially) I guess I could give you a copy to see how I used Thor

[JackPS9]

Can someone help me out with a rain/snow particle system?
I have an emitter working, but the problem is I can't figure out what would be the best way to go about it.

[LanceJZ]

This works fine with the new release of SFML 2.3.2? I'm about to compile it. Thank you for your time.

[bjadams]

Most probably the most useful lib after SFML itself!

I am reading the book SFML Essentials and I am glad that Thor has done a more complete Asset Manager & Animation system than the basic one described in the book

Hope this lib will continue to be developed

[Nexus]

Thank you! Development will definitely continue

I have already started to implement some bigger improvements in the Animations module. I'll push them once I've got something usable