Open Recall: Skeleton animation, Livalink and Eclipse.org downtime

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: open source skeleton animation for Flash, Creative Commons Blender training, PCLinuxOS KDE 2013.02, Parsix 4.0r2, an indie first-person shooter for Linux and downtime at the Eclipse Foundation.

• 2D skeleton animation with Flash – DragonBones is an open source 2D skeleton animation package for Flash that works with the Starling framework; it supports the creation of animations with a texture atlas, eliminating the need of creating animations as single frames separately. This improves game performance, conserves system resources and saves development effort. DragonBones is available to download under the MIT Licence.

• Creative Commons Blender training – The Blender Foundation has made its training DVDs available for download. The downloadable content is made available under a Creative Commons licence and explains how to use the open source animation and film making package to accomplish tasks ranging from character animation to scene composition.
  

• PCLinuxOS KDE 2013.02 – The PCLinuxOS developers have released their latest quartely update of the KDE version of PCLinuxOS. Both PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniMe 2013.02 are now available, the ISO file of the latter edition being able to fit on a CD while the former includes a full suite of productivity applications. Both editions include KDE 4.9.5 and a kernel based on the 3.2.18 upstream release of Linux.

• Parsix 4.0r2 – The latest release of Parsix GNU/Linux comes with GNOME 3 as its default desktop environment and LibreOffice as the default office suite. Parsix 4.0r2 also includes updated packages across the board as the distribution's repositories have been synchronised with Debian testing at the end of January. More information on the updates in the new version are available in the release notes and images for 32- and 64-bit systems are available from SourceForge.
  

• Livalink indie FPS for Linux – The indie game Livalink that was released in December 2012 for Windows is now also available for Linux. The first-person shooter (FPS) game is available from the Desura game distribution platform for £6.50 and offers a single player mode including "dozens of unique weapons and upgrades" and a variety of AI opponents.
  

• Planned Eclipse.org downtime – The Eclipse Foundation has announced that it will be moving its servers to a new data centre. During the move on Saturday, 9 February all Eclipse.org services will be off-line, including the Foundation's bug tracker, wiki, Git services and its main web site. The Foundation hopes that normal operation can be restored by the afternoon of the following Sunday. The move to the new data centre will give the Foundation increased bandwidth and more cabinet space while at the same time reducing hosting costs.
  

(fab)