From: Julian Raschke <julian@...>
Date: 2007-09-17T21:31:03+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Gosu 0.7.5

Hi,

for those interested in game/multimedia programming, Gosu 0.7.5 has  
just been released! When using RubyGems, don't be surprised if you  
see both 0.7.5 and 0.7.5.1; the latter changes a bug with the Gem  
packaging, so install that. :)

Gosu 0.7.5 mostly improved the Ruby support, with a focus on working  
as expected across all platforms for source files in UTF-8 (without  
BOM). This is now the official encoding for developing with Gosu.

Changelog:
* Functions for button id<>character conversion are class methods of  
Window now. Code doesn't break when calling them as instance methods.
* Fixed name clash in CptnRuby.rb
* Fixed memory leaks in load_tiles and from_text (thanks to Galin  
Yordanov!)
* Hid mouse cursor over X11 window (thanks to acetoxy)
* Windows: Gosu ships with fmod.dll now (RubyGosu adjusted to find it  
magically) - no need to download seperately it anymore!

*

 From the amount of feedback and discussion I get via e-mail and find  
in other places, there seems to be a growing interest in Gosu, and in  
Ruby game development in general. (Chipmunk looks really promising  
too!) Does anyone know if there still are timed game development  
competitions anywhere? I think the Python people still hold a regular  
Pygame week, and we should show them what Ruby can do. ;)

*

Also, I have seen conversations about Gosu's design and progress here  
and in other places. As Bill Kelly has correctly stated on this list,  
many features such as collision detection are out of the focus for  
Gosu. There is simply a hundred ways to do it, in fact the tutorial  
games *both* use collision schemes other than rectangular hit-boxes.  
The same is true for implementing a game's object list, there are  
many different approaches how to handle objects that cease to exist  
in game logic. It even is a per-game decision whether to use Fixnum  
or Float object positions.

In light of this, I don't think Gosu lacks, say, a core Sprite class-- 
it's even a good thing that it doesn't get into anybody's way by  
settling on *one* way of doing things! What it does lack, however, is  
more example games, so any creative implementations of genres not  
present in the examples right now would be welcome contributions :)

And while Gosu intentionally leaves out a lot of 'traditional'  
features, I can imagine that bridges to Chipmunk for physics or to  
RMagick for dynamic image creation could turn out very interesting.  
So stay tuned for new releases!

Julian