Fusion: all the sourcey details

Perhaps that should be, all the gourcey details.

The following shows some history of Fusion development, from early 1996, through to August 2010, visualised by gource, and spread over 11 minutes. It's hard to pick out any major milestones - or at least any that correlate with release dates - since the majority of development happens long before any particular release. There are some things I can point out though.



The number of tools and UI controls grow during 1996 and 1997, with the first release of Digital Fusion 1.0 for Windows NT late in 1996. July 1997 shows the tree explode with TIFF and JPEG libraries. While Digital Fusion had already been using them, this was when they were first placed under revision control. It also marks when development was first split between Australia, where all previous development had taken place, and Canada.

1998 shows an explosion of file format support, including QuickTime and OMF support, hardware support, Bins, a Render Manager, and the first version of Paint.

2000 shows the initial development of Particles and Text+, and in there somewhere is the beginnings of the non-grid flow view.

2002 shows DFScript becoming a real product, as part of Digital Fusion 4, along with some reference documentation for it. In there somewhere is the very beginnings of 3D too.

In 2004, there are some wide reaching changes, for Fusion 5 development, to do with transitioning from a binary flow to an ASCII comp format, and changing the plugin SDK from using 32-bit IDs extensively, to using string IDs. The 3D system is starting to mature. Text+ moves from Windows font system, to using freetype for font parsing, with custom character rendering.

By 2005, the basis of 3D has settled, FBX support is added, and development is continued through to the release of Fusion 5 later in the year.

Significant enhancements are made to 3D for 2006, and quite a lot of changes made to get Fusion working on Linux. Not seen here is all the wine updates, and custom wine development. A more advanced materials system based on Cg shaders begins here.

Script plugins, or fuses are introduced in 2008, while the new Cg based 3D material system grows...

2009 sees DoD/RoI and the 3D material system released in Fusion 6.0.

So that's 14.5 years of Fusion development in a nutshell.