Our Continuing Role

Hi all,

I just wanted to give an update regarding my and my company (MousePaw Games) and our fork of Synfig Studio. We have been able to make the proper legal arrangments to fork the original project, and as such we are starting work on rebuilding the core to optimize it for game development.

We do want to continue supporting Synfig Studio, and we want to keep our fork closely associated with it. A few details are still up in the air, but once we have our foundational work done, we’ll be able to get those matters squared away. In the meantime, our contributions to Synfig Studio itself may be quiet for some time, but we have no plans to leave.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to promote Synfig Studio via our company’s promotional channels, and encourage fans to download and donate. We really do believe strongly in this project.

We’ll be in touch.

Great you were able to solve the licensing issues! I hope for good things to come from this! :slight_smile:

I know I’ve been off the radar for quite some time. I’m getting our own game animation engine project, Anari|Lightrift, started at MousePaw Games. That project is no longer a direct fork of Synfig, as we had to fundamentally rethink some major core components.

We did decide to open-sourced our entire game engine under GPLv3 and MIT. [We still have to tiptoe around other GPL code for re-licensing purposes, chiefly that our game won’t be open source, but that’s another topic entirely.] There’s more info on our website.

Anyhow, my intent is still the same to keep MousePaw Games involved in Synfig Studio’s development. Our own Anari|Lightrift project has to approach animation in a completely different fashion, towards the end of game animation, vs cinematic animation, but I am still confident that some of our code and ideas may be helpful to Synfig Studio. (Besides that, we’re still promoting Synfig on our website.) Things will continue to be quiet for a while, as we’re building the foundational code for Anari|Lightrift. Our Github mirrors are still pretty quiet, but that should change in the coming months.

As we write code that may be helpful to Synfig, I’ll share it here on the forums. We’re most excited in the coming months for PawLIB, a C++ library with a number of fundamental features that are missing from C++. I’ve already posted the first stable version of our sorting algorithm.

In addition, our Ratscript language is now open-source under GPLv3. We’re creating a system to connect that language rather easily to a C++ API, so it may still provide the tools for adding a scripting engine into Synfig down the road, if that is a desired feature.

Long story short, we’re still here!

Sounds good … :wink: