As creating precompiled, binary Cafu releases has been a lengthy and tiresome process in the past that involved many manual steps and was prone to errors -- this is also why you typically saw so few of them
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
- export_zip.py prepares new source code releases,
- make_binary.py prepares new binary releases.
You can already see the fruits of these changes at the Downloads page, where the r514 releases have all been created as outlined above. (I will soon post another News announcement that addresses the newly released files and the Model Editor itself.)
Cafu Engine support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP2
Unfortunately, it's getting more and more difficult to continue support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pre-SP2 in the Cafu Engine.
I'm still using Windows 2000 on one of my development machines, and never found that it's lacking any crucial features compared to the Windows 7 system I'm currently writing this post with. So I'm still perfectly happy, and if it was for me, I'd continue using Windows 2000 for Cafu Engine development. However, it's getting increasingly difficult to get recent drivers, software and support for Windows 2000. Worse, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 cannot build program executables that run under Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP2, so we're stuck with Visual Studio 2005.
Well, all good things must come to an end, and so we've decided to officially drop Windows 2000 support in the Cafu Engine. (Inofficially, for my private builds, I'll continue using it for another while.) In fact, the recent r514 Windows releases have already been built with Visual Studio 2010.
I guess it is worth noting that the Cafu Engine has supported Windows 2000 longer than Microsoft itself, and far longer than most projects or companies would have done.
It may be possible to continue building for Windows 2000 using either Visual Studio 2005 or the GCC, but with newer compilers for the latest C++11 standard being just around the corner, we will eventually migrate to C++11 and take advantage of the new compiler and language features.