Crossfire Development Timeline
Significant and noteworthy milestones in Crossfire's development — new races and classes, new maps and content, engine features, protocol changes, client work, and the infrastructure moves that carried the project from a 1992 Usenet post asking for help to a set of repositories still taking commits today. Reconstructed from the original Usenet and mailing list archives, the release announcements, and the commit history of the project's code repositories and community branches.
About this timeline
Dates are given as precisely as the surviving evidence allows. Entries marked with a grey qualifier (c.) are dated from the last changelog entry shipped with a release, from a follow-up post on the mailing list, or from the commit that prepared the release rather than from a dated announcement. Where only a year is shown, only a year is known — those entries describe a period, or a milestone whose exact date is not recorded in any surviving source. Version numbers before 1.0 were assigned informally: several were developer-only snapshots, and the jump from 0.98.0 to 1.0.0 and later from 1.11.0 to 1.50.0 both reflect project decisions rather than regular increments.
Two companion pages document how this was assembled: the research notes record the sources, the findings and the known limitations, and the changelog records how the page was built and what had to be corrected along the way.
Primary sources
- rec.games.programmer — the original 4 May 1992 post
- Early mailing list archives — crossfire@ifi.uio.no, 1992–1996
- Release announcements — 0.91.7 through 1.75.0
- crossfire-announce archives — June 2000 to August 2025; the authoritative send dates for every release announced since 0.95.7
- Git repositories — server, arch, maps, client, jxclient, metaserver, sounds
- Project news archive — 1999 to present; the record for client releases, community infrastructure and convention appearances that leave no trace in the commit history
- Screenshot archive — clients and editors across platforms and years
Community projects covered
- Crossfire Atlas — region-by-region world documentation generated from cfmapper
- Spell Shuffle — archetype branch reorganising spells into coherent schools
- Retro image set — the original 24×24 artwork recovered and extended for modern servers
- ElvenLands — third-party map set contributed as a branch of the maps repository
- Crossfire Web Client — the GTK-v2 client rebuilt in TypeScript and Svelte, over WebSockets
- DockWindow Client — Windows-native client built around a dockable panel system
- Flathub packaging — JXClient as a self-contained Flatpak for Linux desktops
Screenshots are of Gridarta, JXClient, the DockWindow Client and the Crossfire Web Client as shipped. The Gridarta, JXClient and DockWindow images come from the site's own screenshot archive; the web client shot is from its repository. All are shown at a later version than the milestone they illustrate.
Crossfire is a free, open-source, cooperative multi-player RPG. Original code by Frank Tore
Johansen; long-time maintenance by Mark Wedel; ongoing work by the Crossfire Development Team and a
long list of contributors recorded in the server's AUTHORS file.
