MFGOpenStudio is Now Open Source!
FireAlpaca SE Patch Notes — June 1, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
We have released the MFG language system and its IDE, MFGOpenStudio, as open source!
MFG was created with the goal of allowing third parties to develop filters for digital painting software easily, safely, and portably, while still achieving practical performance.
The last point—practical performance—is particularly challenging. Because image filters operate on every pixel, achieving usable speeds with conventional scripting approaches is difficult. MFG addresses this by introducing an entirely new programming language that spans both shader and host-side execution.
I believe this is a world-first approach.
Because MFG can express multi-kernel GPU programs that cannot be achieved with ordinary shaders alone, it enables a much broader range of filters than traditional shader-based solutions.
Over the past several years, I have devoted myself to the development of MFG.
I spent countless hours thinking about questions such as:
What kind of syntax would allow a wide variety of image filters to be expressed concisely?
What abstractions are necessary to fully utilize the massive parallelism of modern GPUs?
What programming model would make it easy to split processing into multiple kernels?
What language features would help avoid side effects when implementing complex algorithms?
How should conditional expressions work so that code naturally corresponds to GPU execution?
At what stage should splat expansion occur?
And many more.
Whenever a new idea came to mind, I would rush back to my computer to implement it.
Looking back, those years were some of the happiest of my life as a programmer.
As a result, for better or worse, MFG has become something fundamentally different from languages that merely resemble existing shader languages. I believe it has developed its own distinct identity.
When I was building MFG, I did not think much about it, but today, with AI coding agents advancing rapidly, I suspect that this kind of software development will become increasingly rare.
MFG will probably be the last software project for which I personally designed and implemented every aspect until I was completely satisfied. It is also likely to be the largest such project I will ever create.
For that reason, being able to release it to the world as open source is personally very meaningful. It represents something special in my life as a programmer.
The open-sourcing of MFG also brings several benefits to its users.
It allows MFG filters to be adapted to new environments, including different platforms, applications, and web technologies, giving those filters greater long-term value.
It also opens the door to new development environments beyond MFGStudio itself. For example, developers could create LSP support, alternative preview systems, visual node-based programming environments, and many other tools.
I believe this expanded ecosystem is one of the greatest advantages of making MFG open source.
What makes MFG truly unique is that the filters you create can be used directly in your everyday creative workflow.
The watercolor filter being released alongside this announcement is an excellent demonstration of MFG's potential, and I hope you'll give it a try.
— karino2