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!