Humm and Strumm

The Humm and Strumm Game Engine, version 0.7 has been released. This release introduces the basis for our our concurrent game loop, better MSVC support, more C++11, and a few new dependencies to improve our engine's code or performance. The current ... [More] plan is to bump the version number to 1.0 once we have a full rendering subsystem and a concurrent game loop, which is our next step. At the moment, we have many independent subsystems, but once we have those, we'll have a workable and performant (if a little lacking in features) game engine. The game engine is available in the gzip and zip formats from the Downloads page. We also now have a nightly test farm that we're almost finished setting up! We'll post here with more information when we're finished!Tags: release [Less]

We're planning a release for the Humm and Strumm Game Engine for Sunday, January 19th. It has been a long time since our last release, so this release has a lot of changes. At this point, we have the basis of what makes our engine unique, and we're ... [More] working on adding higher-level functionality next! Thread Support: In 0.7, we will have started using Intel's Thread Building Blocks library in our game loop, which will serve as the basis for our threading support. TBB allows us to break the game updates into many small tasks with well-defined dependencies, which will then be optimally distributed among all the processor cores on the machine. With this approach, we can efficiently and safely utilize all of the machine's processing power. (Note: this feature is currently being tested, and is not in the mainline code yet.) Build System Refactoring, which should make our build system give much better errors you are missing dependencies. Our build system is also better documented for users who are building the engine from scratch. cipra Unit Tests and Test Farm: As we moved to C++11, we found that our CppUnit tests had many problems with the new language features, especially threading and lambdas. We've moved to a completely C++11 unit testing framework based on Perl's Test::More module, named cipra. You will need to download and install it to build unit tests on any platform now. We also are setting up a nightly test farm to build our engine every night, so we can be sure that it runs on all the platforms we support. Eigen 3: We've added the Eigen 3 library for linear algebra now, which our benchmarks showed were 6 times faster than our own math code. This is because Eigen is an expression-template library, which allows the compiler and Eigen to make many smart optimizations with the matrix expressions. Window System Refactoring: Our windowing code has always been shaking, and hasn't been consistently able to run on all our supported platforms. The new design works on X11 and Windows, and should allow us to easily add targets for Wayland and OS X in the future. (Note: this feature is currently being tested, and is not in the mainline code yet.) To see the list of bugs that have been fixed since we've moved to Sourceforge, see the 0.7 milestone on our Issue Tracker.Tags: pre-release [Less]

We now have a few mirrors of our main Sourceforge git repository. These are primarily for backup, and if our Sourceforge repository ever goes does down, we will still be able to pull from a relatively up-to-date repository. Our two new mirrors are ... [More] at Gitorious and Github. These two repositories update every hour to mirror the current state of our Github repository. We don't accept pull requests or issues at either of these repositories. To report issues or submit a patch/pull request, please add an issue at our issue tracker or contact us.Tags: codewebsite [Less]

Welcome to the new Humm and Strumm Project website! This website is our new home. You should update your feedreaders and bookmarks to this new page. We're still working on getting the project settled in to our new hosting service, Sourceforge, so ... [More] if you find broken links, please tell us so we can fix it. It was a big move, so we may have missed a few things. Now that we've mostly finished our move, development is going to pick up a little. Expect a release soon. As usual, we'll do a pre-release blog entry about a week in advance with all the changes (there are a lot of them) since the last release. We're always looking for more contributors! If you're interested in working on a highly concurrent 3D game engine, please get in touch with us and get involved. Finding our Tools Because we've moved to Sourceforge, most of our tools are in a new place now. Here's a quick overview of what we now have and where you can find it: Home Page (this page)This website has a lot of new information and will have our development updates from now on. RSS FeedOur news RSS feed for this blog will have announcements and updates on the status of the project. We also have a commit RSS feed that has all the commits that we push into the repository. Git RepositoryThis is our official, "blessed" repository. Developers generally work on their own private repositories, and most of the work is either done on feature branches or on the unstable branch. Our master branch is stable and doesn't see changes as often as unstable. You can find information on how to clone the repository at that link. Mailing ListsWe've completely switched our mailing lists. If you were on the old mailing lists, we sent an email out a few months ago telling you how to subscribe to the new mailing lists. We have a different structure for our lists, which you can find on our Contact Us page. We also have an IRC channel, #hummstrumm on Freenode. Development WikiOnly developers can modify this, but it contains a lot of information, especially about the processes of the project and about the code. Issue TrackerOur issue tracker is empty at the moment, but anyone can add a bug. The developers use this for tracking both todo notes and bugs or regressions. See this page for information on how to report a bug using our issue tracker. Downloads ArchiveAlthough you should download the newest releases of the engine from our Downloads page, you can still find older release tarballs on our downloads archive. These are not supported at the moment, because our API is still rapidly evolving. CDash Testing DashboardWe've moved our CDash dashboard, which lists our nightly test results for the unstable branch, and test results for experimental developer code. This site is a good way to check the current progress of the engine on various platforms. Doxygen documentationOur Doxygen API docs are now here. This link will always contain the latest release's API documentation. Tags: website [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. We're going to be starting a new regular blog ... [More] post sequence to keep you updated on our status and changes that are going within the project. During times of rapid activity, this should run every week; other times will be every few weeks. This post will be a long one, with developments from the past two weeks. Git Repo split: The Git repo split that we've been planning has been finished. We now have two separate repositories -- one for our engine, which is our current development focus, and one for our game, which will come later. This makes it easier on us and on packagers to separate the engine from the game in releases. This also makes it easier for any users of the engine -- they don't have to download, build, and install the entire Humm and Strumm game to develop a game using our engine. We're really excited about our plans, which set us apart from the other FOSS engines. We hope game developers will be, too. C++11 requirement: This one has been a major decision for us. C++11 is still very new, and compiler implementation of it is lacking in many areas. However, it gives us amazing new functionality that is hard to get otherwise (specifically, standard , shared_ptr, and most importantly, multithreaded awareness and standard thread classes). This has been causing us some minor headaches with cross-platform support, as libstdc++ doesn't support some features we use, MSVC's support is depressing, at best, and we need to find alternatives in some cases. It also limits our users to using new compilers, which we aren't terribly happy with. We hope the situation will improve speedily. For reference, Scott Meyers has a set of references for C++11 support. MSVC11 support: Tim has been paying special attention to improving the experience on Microsoft's newest Visual C++ compiler, committing lots of fixes and enhancements (like an SSE fix and better organization of source files and header files in the IDE). Code Cleanup and Code Robustness: We've eliminated a little deadweight in the build system and replaced it with a nicer interface, which should make it easier on developers and users alike. I (Patrick) have a branch in my public repo which, when we finish testing it, will fix support for Clang C++11, make for a more stable parser of ISO 8601 dates, and simplify several aspects of the build system. Those are the big changes from the past few weeks. Over the next few days, we will be designing our window system code from the ground up, to make it more stable. There have been reports of it not working on some systems, so we will aim to make it simple and modular. If you have any suggestions, questions, or want to help out, join us on IRC (we're #hummstrumm on FreeNode) or send an email to our hummstrumm-user mailing list.Tags: development-updates [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. I've just joined the project to help out with ... [More] development. My name is Tim Walters or 'realmz' online. Some of areas I've experience with include Linux development, Windows development and OpenGL. [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. Now that the 0.6 release is finished, we are ... [More] now able to concentrate on planning what will go into our next few releases. We have some big changes coming up, and some fun changes, too. Our first orders of business are two house-cleaning matters: Multiple Repositories: From the start, we have designed the Humm and Strumm Game Engine to be general-purpose, not tied specifically to the Humm and Strumm game. It should be possible to use our engine in any sort of 3D game, such as a First Person Shooter or some sort of Role Playing Game (although we don't claim our design is optimal for all genres). On our current infrastructure, however, downloading and using the engine as a library in your own game requires that you also download the Humm and Strumm game (which, granted, is not existent at the moment). To build the engine, you have to also build the game. This is problematic for anyone wishing to play with the engine itself. This also presents a hurdle to those who package our engine for various GNU/Linux distributions. A package can be dependent on our engine without being dependent on the executable game. It has actually been requested from one of our packagers that we decouple the engine from the game in our infrastructure, to ease packaging. We are soon going to solve this by separating the game and the engine into separate Git repositories on Google Code. Any working copies that are checked out will be affected. It is recommended that you simply clone the new repositories again after we finish this. We will send an email to our hummstrumm-contrib mailing list before we start this process, and then another one when we finish. One of the developers will also tell anyone on IRC when we start and finish as well. C++11: For a bit now, we've been investigating the possible use of C++11 in our codebase. Though we already use the C++03 standard (as well as the 1st Technical Report, which most compilers bundle), the new C++11 standard offers many features that really benefit us as a project, ranging from integrated regular expressions support to better Unicode support to a multithreaded programming model. Switching to C++11 would allow us to focus more on the "game engine" parts of our engine, ignoring some of the more trivial tasks we would have had to do. We've been waiting for C++11 to gain wider support from compiler vendors, however. GCC's and Clang's support levels are rapidly growing (GCC and Clang supported features), and Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler, while lagging behind in core language support, will be shipping a complete C++11 standard library implementation with VC11. Other compilers seem to be implementing it, as well. We think it's time to start using C++11 in our engine, to the degree that current implementations allow. From now on, you will need a modern compiler to compile and run the Humm and Strumm game and engine. Modern includes recent versions of Clang and of GCC, and possibly MSVC. Our build system will check and alert you if your compiler does not support a feature of C++11 that we use. Please be mindful of this change. After, that, we will get into some really fun stuff. The Humm and Strumm Engine is finally at the point where we feel that we are ready to add the part of the engine that will make us unique among Free/Open Source Software game engines: full and (hopefully) optimal parallelization. Our ideas are not new in this regard—proprietary engines have already successfully used similar designs, with very good results. To our knowledge, though, our techniques have not been implemented in any FOSS engine so far. This is a little disheartening, but we hope to change that. We will soon publish a design document with our design. We want to have a working subsystem in either this coming release or in the release after it. Stay tuned for a look at our plans for parallelization. Other areas we hope to get some work done on is our renderer, our system abstraction code (in the system:: namespace), and the event system (which depends on our multithreading code). We would love to have some helping hands with this, so if you are interested, please contact us on IRC or through our hummstrumm-user mailing list.Tags: enginedesigncode [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. Now's an exciting time at the Humm and Strumm ... [More] Project. With the Version 0.6 release, we have cleared out the last of our "book-keeping" and "tidying" releases, with bits of code that aren't particularly interesting from a game engine perspective, but are necessary to have a working game engine. Development work has started picking up again, and we actually have packages in two GNU/Linux distributions (ArchLinux and The Chakra Project). We're reasonably confident with the stability of our engine, and we're ready to move into new, uncharted territory—to explore strange, new designs; to seek out new contributors and new communities, and to boldly go where no FOSS video game engine has gone before. Currently, our core team is made up of only two people, and although we have several testers and packages associated with us (whom we wish to thank!), the development on the engine is from the core team, currently. We would like to expand our development team, hopefully allowing us to increase and hasten the work we do on the project, bringing our goal closer to fruition. And we're asking you. What makes you guys different than OGRE, CrystalSpace, etc? These are wonderful projects, but their goals differ from ours. While you can read our goals in our Engine Requirements Document (direct link, PDF, A4 paper, 157 kB), we'll describe our main difference here. All current (major) FOSS engines lack parallelization support that is both efficient and scalable. It is very tricky to properly implement properly, but it has been done. Modern proprietary engines are able to easily scale to computers from one core to n cores. No FOSS engine can do this. We aim to fix this. How can we know you are not vapourware? We have been around for three years, and our codebase shows great activity. We also have package managers and testers outside the Project that have contributed time and effort to helping us. We're dedicated to this. What do I need to know to be on the core team? We need developers who are "fluent" in C++. That is our only requirement. These developers need to be willing to learn about the other technologies that we use (Git version control, a CMake build system, C++11 features, X11 and WinAPI windowing system code, and OpenGL, currently). Any knowledge of these technologies is a plus. Even better would be a developer with experience in real-time threading support or with rendering experience, but these are not required. How can I be on the core team? You can either ask on our IRC channel (#hummstrumm on Freenode) or, none of the core developers are on IRC, send an email to our hummstrumm-user mailing list. We would love to have you join us! Stay tuned for an entry describing our goals for the 0.7 release.Tags: contributorsenginecodeteam [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. The Humm and Strumm Game Engine, version 0.6 ... [More] has been released. This release introduces better integration with the C++ standard library, a new log system, ISO 8601 serialization support, and several stability fixes.Like all 0.x releases, this release is a pure game engine release—this means no playable game yet. However, these releases are necessary, as they provide the backbone to the rest of the game.The game engine is available in the gzip and zip formats from the Downloads page.Stay tuned for our plans for 0.7, which will be big!Tags: release [Less]

This is an archived post from our old blog, preserved just for historical purposes. Information and links in it are probably out of date! Please look at our more recent entries for correct information. We do! We're hosted on Freenode, channel ... [More] #hummstrumm. It's a great place to ask questions about development, if our developers are online. Regardless, we or other online users can help you get set up building, testing, and using the engine. You can also contact us via our mailing lists or our social network presences.Stay tuned for our release on Sunday! [Less]