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In the summer of 2009, a few people gathered in a darkened room in Gran Canaria, to discuss what might be done about the current game development situation on Linux. From there, it was decided to begin putting together a solution to this problem: Support the makers and players of games, all the way from the idea to playing the game and back again.

Then in April of 2010, the first alpha of Gluon was released, which hinted at the Gluon team's implementations of the vision created as a suggestion for how to fix this problem. X-Ray, as the release was named, included one game, and included the beginning of Gluon Creator, the game construction tool.

Now we have reached a point in time where we can create games with Gluon Creator, and do it properly. We have the beginnings of the social features which are the basis of the connection between the makers and players of games. And we have a game engine which by now has most of the features required to create games in today's demanding world.

Since Last We Met

Those of you who played around with the last release of Gluon will remember that the scripting system was somewhat simplistic, and that the graphics system was very old fashioned. Since then, both have been redone almost from scratch.

The scripting system is still powered by QtScript, but is now handled in such a way that it is able to control many more aspects of the game engine, and generally much more consistent.

GluonGraphics has been rewritten as a fully modern graphics engine, with both OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2 support, allowing Gluon based games to run not only on the desktop but also on the many millions of hand held devices out there. It features, along with much more, a new material system based around programmable shaders and a rendering pipeline based around framebuffers, allowing for complete control over the rendering process and its end result.

Game UIs are a hot topic, and where many large games rely on middleware solutions such as ScaleForm, Gluon has decided to use a real user interface solution, specifically the powerful declarative UI system Qt Quick. This allows for fluid user interfaces integrated into your games.

On top of this, many other changes happened, and you can see all of those in the condensed change log found at the end of this release announcement. And, of course, X-Ray Invaders, the game shipped with X-Ray has been updated to employ these new features, and a further game, Electron Apocalypse, was created, showing off others, such as animated sprites.

Finally, those who tried Gluon X-Ray likely noticed an issue with the input system on Linux, namely that a permissions change was needed. This issue has now been alleviated, and input is now not only fixed on Linux, but in fact available on all platforms where Gluon will run.

Game On!

So, with no further ado: Downloads are available now for many platforms, all located on our website at http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/ in the Download section. This includes the entirety of the Gluon platform: The libraries GluonAudio, GluonGraphics, GluonInput, GluonPlayer, as well as the applications Gluon Creator, Gluon KDE Player, Gluon Qt Player and Gluon Player Touch.

As hinted at in the introduction, Gluon Creator is now at such a level that you, as a maker of games, can start up the tool and construct your game. Of course, no matter how much effort we were to put into the usability of our little project, no tool is 100% intuitive, and as such, we present you with documentation on how to use Gluon Creator to build games. These exist both in the form of written guides and short video tutorials, explaining how each part works.

We look forward to your visits to the #gluon IRC channel on irc.freenode.net where the team is happy to receive you and help you with any issues you might have. Or, of course, if you wish to join our little revolution, it's the same place

What Does The Future Hold?

The next step for Gluon is the social aspects, which we hint at in this release through the inclusion of the Gluon Player applications. The beginnings of the distribution site can be found at http://test.gamingfreedom.org/, and you can see the effects of this in the players, where you can use your openDesktop.org account (users of kde-look.org or any others from that network of sites will already be aware of this). This will let you make new comments, as well as view and reply to existing ones.

After the release, we will build a new panel for Gluon Creator, which allows the makers of games to not only upload the games they build, but also keep in contact with the players of those games. This effort also includes the extension of the Gluon Player applications to include downloading of new games and interact with each other directly.

Additions to the game creation features which will happen after this release feature such things as an editing view in Gluon Creator. This view will allow for direct manipulation of the objects in the scenes of your game. This will allow for even easier placing of the objects than is possible now, which will help game designers and other visually orientated users of the tool. We will also be employing the powerful KDevPlatform system, which allows us to integrate version control systems into Gluon Creator, as well as using the code knowledge system to provide code completion and other things, which will make the life of game programmers easier.

Lastly, the near future also holds the Google Summer of Code, where Gluon took part last year under the KDE umbrella; a choice so successful that we will do it again this year. As KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organisation, and with two really great proposals accepted for the Gluon project, and great interest for the Season of KDE as well, we hope to see a powerful boost in development to what is already a fast moving project. More information on these projects will be published over the next weeks and months. In short: The future looks very bright, and we hope you want to take part in it!

Condensed Change Log

General

• Gluon API docs now available on api.kde.org: http://api.kde.org/playground-api/games-apidocs/gluon/html/index.html
  
• New game: Electron Apocalypse! Mouse+keyboard top-down multi-directional survival shooter. Move your goblin with the keyboard, aim with the mouse, shoot other goblins and survive the apocalypse for as long as you can!
  
• New sample game: Ball. Google Code-In project by Michał Koźmiński
  
• Invaders renamed to X-Ray Invaders and given proper menu
  
• General sanity of names and examples
  
• Compilation speed up (also code size) with unnecessary header file eliminations
  
• Code quality changes, refactoring, more and more sanity checks.
  
• AStyle-like code unification
  
• Fix krazy issues
  
• Fix valgrind issues
  
• Eliminate Java-like getters
  
• Fix spelling errors
  
• Improve the documentation
  
• Add lincense into more files where it is appropriate
  

GluonCore

• Handle references to any GluonObject in properties correctly, through the GluonObjectFactory
  
• Refactor GluonObjectFactory to be much more efficient (speed and memory both)
  
• Refactor GDLHandler for clarity, move the GDL parsing methods from the gluonobject into this singleton class
  
• Support comments (ignore them while parsing)
  
• New script system, integrated directly into core, with many improvements
  
• Add simple message passing class (MessageHandler)
  
• Add GLUON_DEFINE_SINGLETON macro for convenience, very handy to create gluon singletons by hiding the internal details.
  

GluonAudio

• Support for streaming sounds (no longer allocates entire music files into memory)
  
• Alure used to handle various useful things, such as further file formats support
  

GluonInput

• Establish a backend based management (backends are X11, mac, windows and the indirect Qt wrapper for X)
  
• Add Qt backend management to the Input system, used when platform-specific input system fails because the user does not have right credentials to read the device directly or when the low-level platform specific implementation is just missing
  
• Add more examples, like a loop for all the devices and/or Qt backend testing example
  
• Rename examples from tutorialX for more talkative ones according to the functionality of the given example.
  
• Implement the touch and keyboard mechanism in a way on N900, thus the touch example for instance works for now (More investigation on the engine later pretty soon because of the Meegathon)
  
• Optimize the linux backend code further on (there were some time-consuming loops that were called more times for iteration than needed)
  
• Eliminate the Standard Template Library namespaces and C, C++ headers usage completely
  
• Implement libudev input detection mechanism (commented for now for later consideration)
  
• Add support for the Qt namespace and start using Qt::Key - much cleaner and easier, simplified code that way (implement the mapping accordingly)
  
• Start the work on the QGesture related Qt touch management, too.
  
• BUG: 236254 - gluon/input: RPMLINT error which must be fixed
  
• BUG: 254842 - gluoncreator can not find keyboard whenever i try to run examples
  

GluonGraphics

• Replaced all the old OpenGL 1.1 rendering code with OpenGL 2.0
  
• Support for OpenGL ES 2.0
  
• Programmable pipeline support, with vertex and pixel shaders
  
• Provide a render widget directly from the library
  
• Remove GLEW dependency
  
• Multiple render target support
  
• Support for using Qt Quick to render in-game UI
  

GluonEngine

• New Scripting asset/component combo, to replace the old, naive system
  
• All new assets for rendering sprites and simple meshes
  
• New material system, based on the new GluonGraphics programmable pipeline
  
• Make Sphere collider component more efficient
  
• New Beam Renderer component
  
• Games are now NeXT style bundles
  
• Renaming objects now means that the files which Assets represent are moved in the bundle's file system, so the object hierarchy and the file system hierarchy are identical
  

GamingFreedom.org

• Development of GamingFreedom.org begins - base and hosting provided by Frank Karlitschek of openDesktop.org
  

Gluon Player

• Gluon Player Plasmoid, Google Summer of Code by Shantanu Tushar Jha
  
• GluonPlayer library created as part of plasmoid project
  
• Gluon Player for KDE, Qt Quick and standard Qt, based on GluonPlayer library
  
• Social features emerge in the Gluon Player apps
  

Gluon Creator

• Prettier listing of objects in the Property View
  
• Ability to handle limits and steps on numerical properties
  
• Templates for Assets
  
• Allow locking the UI
  
• Components list categorised, and generally more friendly looking
  
• KPart support for editing and viewing Assets
  
• Support for rendering mode switching in View pane (texture/wireframe/points)
  
• The beginnings of a visual, graph-based code editor, Google Summer of Code project by Kevin Whitaker
  
• Support for adding custom properties to objects in Property View
  
• Messages pane now shows debug from all debug() calls on all objects
  
• Change menu bar to resemble KDevelop's project-centric approach
  
• Watch assets for changes outside of Creator, and reload on changes
  
• Drag and drop support for rearranging items in the Project View (similar to Scene View)
  
• Fix the left-over, obsolete plugin desktop file related issues, crashes (basically a plugin version management system)
  
• Add Name/Location versatile validation for the newprojectdialog
  
• Add a new bool mouseTrack property inside the mouse component class
  
• Implement the Move Up/Down features inside the property view
  
• Fix the command line argument related crash about the creator
  
• Add overwrite confirmation dialog option for KFileDialog (saveAs).
  
• Reset input filter on game view during play when clicking (allows selecting items in the Scene tree and otherwise interact with Creator's UI during gameplay)
  
• No longer crashes when deleting certain Assets
  
• BUG: 243723 - Add a closeEvent to the mainwindow and stop the game there.
  
• BUG: 233336 - removing GameObject in treeView cannot be saved
  
• BUG: 265016 - Crash when dragging a gameobject in scene treeview to its parent
  
• BUG: 235011 - Gluon: RPMLINT warnings which should be fixed
  
• BUG: 244105 - Gluon crashes upon opening and creation of Gluon projects
  
• BUG: 244107 - Gluon Creator crashes upon load and creation of a Gluon projects