AKFAvatar 0.24.3 released.
AKFAvatar 0.24.2 released.
AKFAvatar 0.24.1 released.
AKFAvatar 0.24.0 released.
The charset support was completely rewritten. It doesn't depend on the system's capabilities anymore, but all is included.
AKFAvatar 0.23.1 released.
AKFAvatar 0.23.0 released.
The code was made less dependend on SDL. There is a new experimantal backend for a Linux framebuffer device, but without mouse support or audio (of course you can call an external audio-player in your scripts).
AKFAvatar 0.22.1 released
This is a major update.
There are a lot of changes in the APIs. Also the ABI was changed.
AKFavatar 0.21.2
This is again mainly a bugfix release, only few changes
AKFAvatar 0.21.1
This is mainly a bugfix release, only few changes
AKFAvatar 0.21.0
The binary packages for GNU/Linux had a bug. The module akfavatar-graphic.so was linked with an old version of libakfavatar.
The new version 0.20.0-1 corrects this.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
AKFAvatar 0.20.0
AKFAvatar 0.19.0
The most important improvement this version brings is support for the Lua programming language. Lua was chosen, because it is very, very small and can be bundled with the binary packages. Lua is also very easy to learn. Although the documentation of it is admittedly not very good for beginners, yet. There is a complete reference of the AKFAvatar-specific functions, but no tutorial. However, users who know another programming language already should not have any problems to learn Lua-AKFAvatar.
But the Lua-support is not only interesting for programmers. There are already quite some ready to use Lua programs and modules. Look for example at the script "fs-quiz-en.lua". There are some lines of code at the beginning, but most of that file is text-data. Every non-programmer should be able to make his own quizzes from this example. Some other files are easy to understand, too. But not all.
For Windows users the support for character-encodings was improved. Now at last they can use their native Windows encodings like "Windows-1252" also known as "MS-ANSI". And yes, they are also supported on GNU/Linux.
The program "avatarsay" is still included in this package, but it is about to be phased out. Most features of "avatarsay" are already rewritten with Lua. Well, the terminal emulation won't be rewritten in Lua, but it will most probably become a separate application in one of the next versions.
It has been a long time since the last official release. But work on the next version is ongoing. It just takes a little longer this time.
The next release will come with Lua as integrated scripting language. So writing applications for AKFAvatar will be a lot easier.
Those who want to test it can already get a test-version. But it is still undocumented and the interface can still change until the release.
AKFAvatar 0.18.0 released.
Notes:
The build system should now also be usable with MinGW+MSys. But that is untested. I tried to do it with Wine, and it didn't work. But I think that this is a problem with wine. I currently really don't have any Windows machine to test it.
If you wonder why I chose AWK for some tools: Well, you don't have to compile the tools, they just run. This is especially important for crosscompiling. AWK is required by POSIX and so it should be available on every modern system. For Windows it is available with MinGW+MSys, which you'd need to compile it anyway.
Saving the settings isn't well tested yet, especially not for Windows. So if you have problems with it, please contact me.
The documentation might be a little outdated now. I think about rewriting it as Manpages anyway...
AKFAvatar 0.17.1 released.
The pager can be used like this "avatarsay --pager file.txt" or from a terminal session in avatarsay with "avtcmd -s pager file.txt". The scripts "avtman" and "gnome-akfavatar" also use the pager for manpages now, so does "avatarsay" itself.
In the pager you can use the up and down arrow keys or the mouse-wheel to scroll through the text. You can also use the Home, End, Page up, Page down keys. The space-key can also be used for page down. To quit the pager you can either press Q or Esc or you can press on the mouse-wheel (on some mice) or you can press the close button of the window (which doesn't necessarily close the window: if you started from the main menu of avaatarsay, it just goes back to that menu).
AKFAvatar 0.17.0 is released.
In earlier versions I mainly supported the BMP format and the Wave format, both are Microsoft formats. They increasingly go around and try to collect license-fees for their stuff. So I was convinced to implement alternative formats. The Microsoft formats are still usable with AKFAvatar if you want to, but you don't have to anymore. Well, the code for Wave and BMP support doesn't infringe any Copyrights, since no code from them is used, I don't know about any patents on that formats, and trademark law doesn't even touch code implementations. So from the mere legal point of view, it should be safe. Unfortunately they use the nebulous term "intellectual property", which doesn't mean anything in particular, so they still could claim that it's theirs.
AKFAvatar now supports SUN AU audio files with linear PCM, µ-law or A-law encodings. The encodings µ-law and A-law can be seen as a weak audio compression. They store each sample in 8 Bits, but it sounds much better than 8-Bit linear PCM! It can read AU files with 24 or 32 Bit PCM, but they are only played as 16-Bit audio.
Also "raw" audio data is supported now with linear PCM, µ-law or A-law encoding. This could be used to implement support for other audio file formats outside of the main library.
Note that "µ-law" is also often called "mu-law", "u-law" or "U-law" - that is all the same encoding. But "A-law" is a different one.
For images the XPM format is improved. AKFAvatar can now also read XPM files when SDL_image is not installed. The XPM format is better suited for avatar-images, because it supports transparency. For BMP I had to do a very dirty hack to achieve that. XPM is also much better for programmers, because the files can easily be included in code, especially in C code. But there is also one drawback: XPM files with lots of colors can get very large. So better just use few colors. You can still use SDL_image with AKFAvatar, which supports a number of other image formats.
For the program "avatarsay" the old datadir concept was removed. The environment variable AVATARDATADIR is no longer supported. Now the working-directory is the datadir. When running demo-scripts from the command-line, the directory is changed accordingly. You can still change the directory from inside your demo-script with the datadir command though.
Furthermore some problems with the color of the balloon-shadow and the background-color were fixed.
The server Savannah had technical problems the last few days, so some things were/are not available.
The project AKFAvatar is now migrating away from CVS to Git. I was unable to work on my project when Savannah was down. With Git I am more independent from the server or my internet connection in general. And there are other reasons, too.
The CVS will no longer be updated. So you should delete your CVS working directory and get a new one from Git.
http://savannah.nongnu.org/git/?group=akfavatar
Note: I can't currently update the homepage.
AKFAvatar 0.16.0 is released.
Please check out the new "Max & Moritz"-demo!
It is in the download area too.
What is new in 0.16.0:
You can use the script "avtcmd" from the interactive shell.
For example to set the balloon-size "avtcmd size 4, 40"
To change the avatar-image use "avtcmd -s avatarimage me.png"
AKFAvatar version 0.15.2 is released.
This release fixes several bugs and inconveniences.
Furthermore there are some optimizations.
You might notice, that the packages are a little smaller now, and compiling is much faster. There isn't anything missing. This is just due to the optimizations.
There are also some improvements in the usability. Especially the menu and the file-chooser are a little nicer.
The menu can now be used in three different ways:
The full description of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.