GIMP 2.4 User Manual

Recently, the GIMP reached the next milestone with version 2.4, and now the new GIMP 2.4 User Manual is also finished.

Gaming Miniconf 2008

The next Gaming Miniconf will be at the linux.conf.au in Melbourne on Tuesday, 29th of January 2008. It aims to promote both FOSS Gaming and FOSS Game Development.

GIMP 2.4 Released

Developers, artists and user interface designers from all over the world worked together to make GIMP more powerful and easier to use than ever. The changes from version 2.2 are too numerous to list here, please check the Release Notes to get an overview.

If you want to compile GIMP 2.4 yourself, you can grab the tarball from ftp.gimp.org or one of its mirrors. Binary packages for the various supported platforms are becoming available as we speak. Our Downloads section should help you to locate the package for your system.

New Project: Search Engine For Free Media Content, Developers & Projects

I'll announce the development of a search engine for free art, and a developer/project database starts to get serious. It's work is done in collaboration with Freegamer. A more detailed description is found at Ghoulwiki, but I'll give a quick an overview of the basic ideas:

• bring artists and developers closer together
• search engine for existing free art
• a database for projects and developer
• using the CakePHP framework
• thread at freegamer
• thread at unixgamedev

At the moment we're in the planning phase and probably have three developers for this project. It seems we all have to learn how to work with CakePHP, though this shouldn't be a big problem.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or even think about helping us, feel free to contact - we appreciate the feedback.

Btw. Ghoulsblade has collected an awesome list of free game development links. It's definitely worth to have a look at it.

AMD's New Open Source Strategy

In a press statement AMD announced better support for Linux in the future, and "also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well". The question is just, what are those efforts? At LWN a declaration to this statement is made, and announces AMD reported at the Kernel Summit, that they will open the graphic specs for their graphic processors from the R500 forward.

Well, if this is true then it's really good news, and just another great move toward full 3D for Linux.

Edit: The speculations about AMD's strategy about their obscure open source effort is finished, and gave a detailed statement, but in short: "AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result."

Next Round for OpenGL

The last weeks OpenGL comes out with some good news. At first the announcement of OpenGL 3.0, which will drop backward compatibility to get better performance of modern hardware and makes development easier.

The second thing is the Linux release of the gDEBugger, a high quality OpenGL debugger and profiler. This tool will help to make your applications faster by letting you trace for performance killer and bugs.

The last thing is the release of the glslDevil, a tool for debugging the OpenGL shading pipeline.

John Carmack on the Future of Linux Gaming

John Carmack, the lead programmer of id Software (Wolfenstein,Doom, Quake, ...), gave his statement about the future of Linux gaming on the QuakeCon, and that he will continue to publish his sources of Doom 3, but read the complete article at United Underground.

Mesa 7.0 now supports OpenGL 2.0

Some great news (I know it's not the latest) for every 3D gamer and developer. Mesa supports OpenGL 2.0.

Mesa is know to be the free cross-platform implementation of OpenGL, partitially lags the latest OpenGL version, now advanced features from OpenGL 1.5 to 2.0. One of these improvements is the OpenGL Shading Language GLSL, which directly executes shader by the GPU.

Last september OpenGL released version 2.1, and the next extension of OpenGL, Longs Peak and Mount Evans, are planned this year. Since Mesa involves some full time programmers, the hope to support new features early improves. At least not to wait again some years; this one needed time since 2003.