OpenTTD OpenGFX OpenTTD moved a step closer to being a Free Software game with alpha releases of OpenGFX, the "[8bpp] Graphics Replacement Project". There's still a few black boxes ("features") where yet-to-be-replaced buildings should be, but it looks fairly good other than that. OpenTTD 32bit extra zoom Of course, this is just the low-resolution replacement that makes OpenTTD fully free, and is not to be confused with the high-resolution graphics work (see screenshot). The more detailed graphics are [unsurprisingly] less further along. In the meantime, there is a totally Free Software transport game in Simutrans. Simutrans Pak96 Comic Pak96 Comic [for Simutrans] looks especially gorgeous. Clean, clear, and consistent graphics mean you can focus on gameplay rather than get distracted by artifacts or areas that are difficult to visually parse. The simplistic style has meant they have been able to rapidly create a large number of graphics with minimal deviation in style. There are different climates zones and architectures. Also it's bigger than the oft-tiny-looking standard pak64 graphics (equivalent to OpenTTD's 8bpp graphics) whilst not oversized like the pak128 (equivalent to OpenTTD's 32bpp graphics) can appear. It's a good balance for the standard resolutions today and fun to play - a better experience IMHO than standard OpenTTD or Simutrans. Download it from here. Egoboo 2.6.8 has been released (see 2nd post in that thread for the impressive changelog). To quote the homepage on what 2.6.8 brings us: This release includes a lot of new content, and a lot of bugs have been squashed. It is also -- Macintosh users rejoice -- finally available on all three platforms! It got extended beta testing and the development seems to be maturing a bit as well. Whilst previous versions have been plagued by long-standing issues, from my observers parapet it would appear they have largely been dealt with. I haven't tried it, but it looks like they have finally fully emerged from the mess that Egoboo once was and it is now a healthy project and a playable game. Congratulations especially to developer Zefz whose determination and dedication have saved the game. Anybody who tries 2.6.8, please post a comment on your experience! P.S. I'm unable to access the forums currently :-( due to voluntary content restrictions on my Internet connection. However that, in a way, is a good thing. I'm supposed to be programming Fortress, y'see, so now I have less distractions... we'll see how it works out.

Meritous: lots of projectiles and no shields Through Libregamewiki, I found a game that was new for me: Meritous, a real-time dungeon crawler (like Goblin Hack) with strong arcade tendencies. Meritous's map viewIn the game you walk through rooms and fight monsters. These enemies sometimes have multiple forms (and thus need to be killed more than once). You try to avoid the projectiles they shoot at you, while charging your psi circuit, to release a circle shock wave of destruction. Sometimes there are boss fights. When the enemies are slain, you collect the crystals that they dropped. These can be used to upgrade the speed with which your weapon charges, to decrease it's cool-down time or to strengthen your shield (yes, you have a self-recharging psi shield thingey). Other than the purchasable upgrades, there are free upgrades and permanent bonus-giving artifacts to be found in treasure chests after boss battles. The impression of the game on me is a very positive one. It has a cyberwizard/cyberpunk style and uses color of the environment and different music to convey information: the redness of the surrounding indicates the danger (amount of enemies) and the music lets you know what part of the map you are currently in. The music palette consists of various funky and/or chill chiptunes. Also please be warned: because of the addicting attitude of this game, I went to bed at four in the morning yesterday..

Warzone 2100's new look Development of new, experimental terrain renderer for Warzone 2100 has started. It blends textures depending on terrain and it looks freaking awesome. For comparison: an example of the old terrain. Four CGTextures-texturs (at 1024x1024 pixels) were kindly permitted to be used under GPL terms. But more are needed. If you happen to have some mad texturing skillz up your sleeves: Warzone 2100 needs you!

Fall of Imiryn r792Annchienta is an isometric RPG engine. It is being used by the console-style RPG Fall of Imiryn (FoI), created by the same developer. The terrain is kind of 3D while everything else is good old pixel-ish sprites. So how playable is the game? Well, it has NPCs and enemies, it has end bosses and maps and character levels and skills and spells. There is grinding and there are savepoints. Sounds complete? Oh right, story! It has story too. I don't know how much though, still have to find the right spot to catch some fish first... I must admit that because of FoI I will go to bed one hour later than planned. (Is it clear that I'm trying to say that it's interesting enough to waste your time on it? Because I'm tired and not sure my phrase there is 'gettable'. O_o Moivng on..) Lavirinto 3D 0.6.2Lavirinto 3D is now of version 0.6.2 and completely free: problematic sounds and music have been removed, sources of included library binaries are now included. There's even a WebStart version for people who are too lazy to open a downloaded file! A reminder: Lavirinto 3D is a fun puzzle game which you should be playing right now if you haven't done so yet! Putting Blood Frontier's new Carabine to good useBlood Frontier! Ah, Blood Frontier, now that you have an energy weapon instead of the pistol, a new weapon called 'Carabine' and fun reflecting bullets, you're so much more unique and pleasure! The reflecting bullets are a real joy! They are like billiard, just even more brutal! Unfortunately the effect is totally out of proportion to the current 'realistic sci-fi' feel of the game and I'm afraid it will be reduced a little or a lot. :| You will have to get the Subversion version to join the newly added fun by the way. And if you're too lazy to check out the SVN, at least check out some of the screens I made. Eisenstern inventoryThe last jest for tonight is about the yet again awesome development going on Eisenstern-Subversion-side. (Cube2-based RPG, remember? ;) ) In the game you can now buy and sell and equip weapons and armor and spells (as items) and there are some wolves and bears around, which you can kill, so they drop money and re-spawn some minutes later. You get experience points and can level up. A new prototype map allows testing of those new functionalities. I believe that also the first quest of the game got implemented: you can earn an apple by killing a bandit king! As always, it's so great to see the project becoming more and more of a game. Here's the screenshots link.

OGRE 1.6.0 aka Shoggoth is the newest version of the acclaimed 3D engine. I don't understand anything that's on the changelog, but it obviously goes beyond bugfixing and tweaking. :) There are no recent pre-compiled packages available, so the source way is the way to go, for now. The Infinity Engine's clone GemRB had some DONEs added to it's TODO, when version 0.3.1 was released a month ago. The current scope is to implement meele fighting. OpenMW, an OGRE-based engine for TES3's game data, is now 0.5-versioned. Considering that the project started in this year's june, this number is quite impressive! Does this mean that we will have a final version of OpenMW by the start of 2009's summer? :D However, animations, interaction and user interface are not yet implemented. Also: check out these videos that show the progress of the engine so far. cocos2d-iphone is yet another GPL-ed game framework and you can probably guess the platform it's designed for :). However, freedom freaks will argue that free software can not exist on an iPhone. Ignoring all that, I find the Video presentation of the engine very spiffy. It demonstrates all the features in a more entertaining way than the raw text listing over here. The Kambi VRML game engine now contains a demo of Precomputed Radiance Transfer. It has something to do with real-time lighting I think.

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you. Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details. It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video: Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track. There's a new development release of Oolite, the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 (announcement, changelog) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project. FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say. Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video: Open Octane, announced in the forums, aims to be a fast paced car combat game where you can destroy most things in the game world. You can see the car crashing through trees and fences in the demo below: Open Octane physics demo 2 from The Oracle on Vimeo. It reminds me of another open source game that I can't remember right now as it's late and I have other things to do. I'm sure I'll remember later or somebody will post in the comments the game I'm thinking of...

LordsAWar! 0.1.3 LordsAWar! reached an (unstable) 0.1.3 release. After installing some game-uncommon libraries and compiling for half an hour, I expected to move some units around for some turns and stop playing from being bored. But actually, I enjoyed the simple game rules. LordsAWar! has decent graphics and good music. I like very much that the game cares about the player by providing a 'restore crashed game' button. The game did crash once, but think I shouldn't have started it together with an other app from the same command line and then moved the game window while it was generating a level... :) Actually LordsAWar! makes a stable impression. The only thing that confused me in some situations is the path finding. Units would walk in a zig-zag pattern instead of straight lines. I think this might be because vertical/horizontal and diagonal movement is equally expensive and that the behavior is not a bug. LordsAWar! 0.1.3 [direct download] After the absence of an official OpenArena release for a while, 0.8.1 was recently uploaded. It weights one map more (+3-2) compared to 0.8.0 and features a new hit sound (one of the most important parts of any Quake-related game). Commander Stalin 0.9.3 Commander Stalin's latest version, 0.9.3, was released for Windows and Linux systems. It's a RTS that appears to just replace most of Bos Wars' media. There is no single-player campaign unfortunately. Today I understood what the game's Stalin-theme might be all about: a parody of Red Alert! However, I feel discomfort with the media of the game: for Charles II's sake, half of this CD's audio tracks is distributed with the game! (Yes, someone owns the exclusive copyright on these re-mastered communist songs.) I agree that the music fits the theme, but such practice is not legal. Nor is it very original.

Widelands A quick one today. Firstly, I forgot to mention Widelands yesterday. A new version, a release candidate for build13, is available for download. The changelog is immense, so it should be large improvement over build12 which, for me, felt a little unpolished. Some of the highlights of build13 are: More stable multiplayer FPS regulation for less CPU usage Improved economy routing Many new sounds Many new graphics and animations especially for the Atlanteans Balancing work for all tribes Not to harp on too much about Scourge, but I find the recent AI updates fairly fascinating. Developer lordtoran describes the effect of the change to a decision matrix from the crude system that used to be in place before: Creatures that can't reach a location behave a lot more intelligent now: For example, if a monster can't reach you because you are surrounded by other monsters, it will loiter a bit and then throw a damaging spell or heal someone. When one of your attackers falls, it will engage in melee if there is enough space. I find it quite fascinating how the creatures have a "life of their own" just by using a simple decision matrix. That sounds better than a lot of commercial game AI - which in general is notoriously bad considering the resources that go into some titles.

Something important happened last night. Something transformational. Qubodup designed a new forum logo. :-) For those that don't follow the planet, which is titled "news" in the link bars ^^, there have been some great game updates lately. Vega Strike ship: MK32 This update on Vega Strike is a great read with some screenshots of the many gorgeous new models that have gone into the game. They also have a new gallery system since the old one was fairy broken after the Sourceforge web hosting service updates. Scourge gets plenty of planet-time these days with a (now 7 week strong) weekly update. Over the last few months there's been an AI overhaul, lots of optimization and leak fixing, an item model/artwork overhaul, and lots of miscellaneous small improvements to the game. Short of a nice animation system and character model pipeline (most of the character models are assorted free[ware] md3 models) the game is looking very good indeed. Once better support for animated models (probably using assimp and obj/md5) is tackled, Scourge will be a very strong project indeed and hopefully a few adventure RPG game projects will appear, using Scourge as their base/engine. Hedgewars 0.9.7 is out. The video is so reminiscent of classic Worms gameplay, it's uncanny. If you swapped the hedgehogs for worms, I wouldn't have known the difference. It looks great and has much stronger multiplayer support in the new version. The artillery clone scene is probably one of the strongest open source game genres with strong competition between Hedgewars, Wormux, Scorched3D and (the more action oriented) Teeworlds, among others. CGMadness I was impressed by CGMadness, which has smooth graphics and potentially good gameplay. It like Trackballs but has a nicer feel which is difficult to really quantify. Intriguingly there is CGPortals which promises to take CGMadness and add portals to it - that should be an interesting combination although I didn't try out the early versions. The number of projects that extend Sauerbraten seems to be growing all the time. From the cubedev blog (another listed on the planet) I came across the Plexus project which looks to take Sauer and turn it into a more flexible game system. They've already implemented a much nicer mouse handling system and the ability to import Dwarf Fortress maps, and more. "Socket level control of Sauerbraten" sounds especially useful, giving developers the freedom to control Sauerbraten from their programming language of choice. The planet and the forum are great for the FOSS gaming scene as it means that the community can communicate much better with the world around it. It's bad for this blog though because I don't feel the need to post much, but that's good for me since posting used to take up way too much time. These days it's much easier to post too.

Free Art Search shared media map Free Art Search, the svn/cvs/git media tracking application developed by hagish and ghoulsblade, now has an overview over the data that is shared between different projects. I find this tool very exciting! It shows how open sourcing media does help projects and if it was more detailed, one could see what media-demand exists.

Release 4.1 of Brain Workshop introduces some GUI tweaks and a new sound theme (piano notes instead of spoken letters). I finally gave it a try and was able to record sound via recordmydesktop with the help of this config guide. The rules of the game are: watch and listen and press one button if the same field becomes active as it was n (a number) rounds before or if the same sound appears as it was n rounds before. I'll definitely 'play' this brain-trainer some more. :) Brain Workshop 4.1 Are you into web-based strategy games? Epoch is an sci-fi/space type one. Development started in 2002 and it is open source. According to this forum post, Epoch's team is now working on an OGRE-based 3D game with the same setting, but it might take some years. You might have heard about the "open source", GNU/Linux-based, 250$ EVO Smart Console. Lol. 100% vaporware.

Unnamed Game This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid". Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum. Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?) after I registered and pointed out this problem. So until things change I'm probably not going to be able to give an update on any TPB3D progress. They do seemed to have designed a lot of flat rides (youtubes) but no roller coasters yet, and certainly nothing close to a playable game. Still, a good one for theme park or Theme Park (I loved that game) enthusiasts. Bloodmasters Hey, Windows guys, go download Bloodmasters. Fast, furious fun. It's Free Software and C#. Hey Linux dudes and dudettes, go find some Mono expert to get it ported. I should mention this game more... Tim "mithro" Ansell from the Thousand Parsec project got in touch recently: ...It is a framework (and games) for building turn based space empire games. You can find out more at http://www.thousandparsec.net/ We have recently been part of the Google Summer of Code and have written up an announcement about the success of the project. You can find that announcement here - http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/news.php/2008-10-16-1400... In a follow up email he goes on to say: At the moment I am actively trying to get more people to actually play Thousand Parsec games. The lack of players is reducing the motivation to do releases and fix bugs (instead of tinkering with some random feature). It also means that the quality and quantity of our output can be quite low. Thousand Parsec The thing is, TP is introduced (by him, by the TP website) as a game framework. As a player looking for a game to play, a framework is not that interesting to me. You can play TP, so it is a game, but I think they have a perception problem. For example, Freeciv is a game and a framework. But it's a game first, and then when you get drawn in, you see all the different tilesets and mods. TP needs to sort out it's image and have a default game that is presented first if they want to catch more players. People looking for a framework will find it just as easily. Qubodup wants to switch off blogger comments - we got some spam lately - and simply have a link to the forum after each post. Opinions welcome.

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing! Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or, if you love acronym overload, a FOSS SP FPS RPG. Or FSFR if you love acronym acronyms. I'm digressing again... it's a bad habit! The Apricot Project is coming to the final stages of it's effort, and thus the game Yo Frankie! nears it's official release. It looks really, really good. The graphics are fantastic and the gameplay looks fun too. Here's the video: Blender 2.48 just got released, and it includes many improvements contributed by the Apricot Project during it's development of Yo Frankie!. (That '!' messes with my grammar, but I'll resist the temptation to digress.) It looks like a real boost to the Blender Game Engine as a platform for creating games: Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support. Warzone2100 2.1-beta5 came out at the end of September, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere. Well \o/ it just got mentioned here! Erm, but, back on topic, WZ 2.1 is approaching "super stableness" which is always a good thing. Check it out if you love your 3D future war RTS games and open source. :-) And to round off, lately there have been some awesome contributions to Vega Strike. There's some real eye candy to be had here. This alien space base or this massive space ship are two intimidatingly beautiful examples. There's plenty more to be found. (Disclaimer: I may have posted some of this before, I'm a big fan of the project.)

There's a few juicy updates to several great Free Software game projects over the last few days. I'm feeling too lazy to grab screenshots though. You'll just have to peruse yourself if you find something interesting. We'll start with TA:Spring 0.77b3 - Linux and Windows binaries are up for download - with the comment, "After some people have stated that we should release more early and often*, we give you 0.77b3 here." I downloaded and installed it using the generic Linux installer - worked without a hitch - and it looks fan-bloody-tastic. Still, the state of licensing of some of the content is a little unclear - I don't feel reassured that I'm playing a totally Free game although I'm certain some of the mods are Free Software. That doesn't bother me like it might some of the purists out there. OpenLieroX 0.57_beta8 arrived. Worms and blood and chaotic 2D action. It's a pixel dream. Open City 0.0.6 beta can be found on Sourceforge. There's no release notice yet on the website but there's plenty of features in it. Open City is a largely unknown open source 3D city building game. It really deserves more attention than it gets IMHO. The fundamental gameplay foundations are already in place and it's a more in-depth game than Lincity[-NG] or Micropolis (aka Sim City classic), but lacks the polish and stability required to make it attract a larger playing community. Every release is a step closer! Ok, hrm, how about two new [to Free Gamer] projects? LBA Prequel (project) is a fan-made effort to create a Free game based on the Little Big Adventure universe, a prequel to the original games. The franchise is officially discontinued so unofficial intervention is required. They are taking the work of two previous projects - which partially reverse engineered the original games to create cross platform engines to play them - to create an engine capable of playing the original titles and the game LBA Prequel is essentially a total conversion that uses this engine. Epic of Thalia is an RPG of the non-MMO variety. Woohoo! MMO has become the new shell suit, for those of us that don't like MMOs. Alas, I digress. The game is in early stages of development and the website is cryptic until you realise you have to click on the 'navigation' button. What is good is that they have an active source repository** and a few concept releases already, which is more than many aspiring projects make. The Epic of Thalia team is, like all good open source projects, looking for contributors. * I firmly believe it is true: "release early, release often" is the mantra of a successful open source project. ** It's Darcs. Which reminds me of a new DRCS I saw called Fossil - it's an integrated RCS, Wiki, and bug tracking system. Think git meets trac. Anybody tried it yet? EDIT: Just got emailed that Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.2.4 is out. The project is an attempt to make a version of Sauerbraten that's more kid-friendly and oriented around cooperative content. Lots of new features and there's been work on a Kid Friendly RPG (brainstorming) for it too, check out Cabzilla:

Quake2World skeleton pointing grenade launcher at you Recently, I became friends with an open source first-person shooter: Quake2World (q2w). As the name indicates, it uses an idTech2-based engine and currently aims to have Quake 2's mechanics. Although development seems to be centered around graphical features at the moment, the game is sexy and fun. There are no bots so far and only a minimal selection of servers, so you'll have to ask for some company on #quetoo@freenode, which is the community's home. The project is looking for code and content contributors. The current policy is to allow content licensed under GPL/CC-licenses/Zlib/MIT/WTFPL (although I believe that some of the included content is not compatible with any of these). Quake2World Promo Video

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42 USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems. I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time. The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons: Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems) microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it Here's the link to the pd-licensed diagram source. In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible. Well, it is. Though maybe not enough to cover the expenses of a non-minimalistic lifestyle. I hope Howitzer Skrimish will get the 300 USD. And that the possible troubles of microPledge won't destroy the donation progress so far. Now give me money, that's what I want! *sings* PS: In case you think that Howitzer Skirmish looks like a tech demo and less like a game or in case you weren't content with Stormbaan Coureur; Bram made following statement on the comment section of this post: once I release my source code, and the community considers it to be a tech demo and not a game, then there will be no pay out. Everybody keeps their money, and Howitzer Skirmish and its data will be GPL. PPS: What would you pay for? Kiba brought that interesting question up in our forums and I'd love to get more replies to that.

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems. I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time. The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons: Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems) microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it Here's the link to the pd-licensed diagram source. In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible. Well, it is. Though maybe not enough to cover the expenses of a non-minimalistic lifestyle. I hope Howitzer Skrimish will get the 300 USD. And that the possible troubles of microPledge won't destroy the donation progress so far. Now give me money, that's what I want! *sings*

OpenArena 0.8.0 recently got unreleased, because the project administrator decided that some included textures by TRaK were not legally GPL-licensed. Free as in freedom CG Textures? No. :( So why do the CG Textures-based textures seem GPL-incompatible? Well, Marcel, CG Textures' administrator, wrote at least twice, that the textures on his website cannot be re-licensed under a free content license. Also the CG Textures license clearly states, that re-distribution of the textures and of derivate versions in texture form is prohibited. The right to re-distribute is one of the pillars, on which free software, open source and free works stand. But it is not simple dogmatism which makes me agree with these definitions. When I create a piece of media for use in games, then I want to give others the ability to change it as easily as possible, so it fits their need. Because of this, it is vital that I am allowed to provide the source (the most raw/least edited form of the media) to them. This is not possible in the case of CG Textures. :( However, TRaK has a permission to release his resulting textures under the GPL if he follows some conditions in creating these textures (which he did). These conditions only apply to TRaK, so the resulting textures are indeed free. Still his work is not to be included in OpenArena. I don't understand why. A new community member named titi recently asked for a free texture reference image host and some of us recommended the public domain image gallery BurningWell.Org to him. He started uploading lots of files to it and even got permission to re-structure the gallery to optimize it for textures! Hagish decided to set up a torrent tracker and to create a torrent of BurningWells' textures for easier downloading and for backup. Although gallery, the system used by BurningWell.Org, might not be optimal for textures and although torrents are not perfect for sharing data that gets new additions frequently: there seems to be a bright future for free as in fancy pants freedom textures. :)

Toying with Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2's Editor(HD) Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2 has been released and now needs a new home! It is house-trained and can be picked up 24/7 from it's SourceForge shelter. One can now enter buildings (in a pleasant no-transition way) and an editor is now included. I gave the editor a try. My first thought was: "What a waste of energy! Why did they not incorporate Tiled, as for example Battle Tanks did?" But then I remembered that my last encounter with the general purpose Java editor. It showed me that instead of being able to completely rely on Tiled, a team would have to create an extra tool for tasks that go beyond map editing. At least a team of non-Java programmers (Allacrost is in C++ and Lua). Allacrost's editor will go beyond tiles. When it's finished, it will also be a character, skills and inventory editor and will support integration of music/sounds. Greg Cannon blocking the view on STK ;) GamePwned is a freeware and open source games blog. A video-review of VDrift and SuperTuxKart was recently posted on it. (The third one, HoverRace, has a weird license). Reminds me of the time when freeware titles were often mentioned on Free Gamer. Mid-1980s IIRC. I wonder if Sauce The Game is ever going to happen again... Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3 Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3 is out and some of the changes indicate a wide player base: auto team balance and anti-spam fixes. I gave the game a try a minute ago and the fun and prettiness and cuteness are there! Unfortunately I'm no fan of grapple hooks. Teewars' Teeworlds' license is a bugger though. Instead of "please don't sell this game" is says "you have to include a hello world app if you want to sell this game". On the other hand, ladies and gentlemen: the bikeshed.

Lavirinto 3D 0.6.0 Lavirinto 3D [video] brings Zen wisdom, Pipes and Pac-Man together. It's a 3D version of the game Zenji [video]. The colorful levels and friendly music made me quite enjoy the stay and I even finished all campaigns. I noticed only one rudeness of the game: if you loose all your lives, you have to re-play all the levels of the campaign. :| The game is written in Java (using lwjgl) and thus runs on every machine with a Java runtime environment installed. Just use the .sh or .bat script! The code is GPL and most of the media too. Some sounds were taken from Soundsnap, which is an non-free resource, and will be replaced soon. Four people were involved in the creation: One lead designer, developer and visual artist, one assistant texture artist, one assistant developer and one musician. I think the end product is handsome. Balazar 3, 2D version Balazar 3 was released. It's a room-based slash and hack game, with some nice graphics in both 2D and 3D mode. It also supports multiplayer games. Not being able to figure out how to install the latest Soya3D version, I only tested the 2D version. So far it feels very prototype-like: no plot, no quests, few enemy types. But the existing graphics look nice and most feature seem implemented. A little more work and it could become a nice time waster. OpenAnno 2008.1 settlement The real-time/city building strategy game OpenAnno was finally release [video] on October the first. You can download this first milestone for 32/64 bit GNU/Linux systems and 32 bit Windows systems. I was hesitant to try it, fearing it would come not even close to it's role model Anno 1602 but when I tested it, I began to feel the fun of building the settlement and I wanted to build (not-yet implemented) lumberjacks to build more houses to rise the population count so I could finally have (not yet existent) masons who would get stone from the (hopefully soon existing) mountains, so I would be able to improve the paths to pretty and speedy stone roads... For a tech demo: nice! Of course the controls are not as nice as they probably will be but I'm eagerly waiting for the next release now! One thing though: the absence of mountains causes agoraphobia in me.. Detail of older Pandora concept render In case you feel like pre-ordering the Pandora handheld GNU/Linux console: you have one more day. Next chance will be in 2009. The price range is 330-380 USD / 260 EUR / 200 GBP depending on what continent you order it on.

OpenArena 0.8.0 recently got unreleased, because the project administrator leilol decided that some included textures by TRaK were not legally GPL-licensed. Free as in freedom CG Textures? No. :( So why do the CG Textures-based textures seem GPL-incompatible? Well, Marcel, CG Textures' administrator, wrote at least twice, that the textures on his website cannot be re-licensed under a free content license. Also the CG Textures license clearly states, that re-distribution of the textures and of derivate versions in texture form is prohibited. The right to re-distribute is one of the pillars, on which free software, open source and free works stand. But it is not simple dogmatism which makes me agree with these definitions. When I create a piece of media for use in games, then I want to give others the ability to change it as easily as possible, so it fits their need. Because of this, it is vital that I am allowed to provide the source (the most raw/least edited form of the media) to them. This is not possible in the case of CG Textures. :( However, TRaK has a permission to release his resulting textures under the GPL if he follows some conditions in creating these textures (which he did). These conditions only apply to TRaK, so the resulting textures are indeed free. Leilol apparently never recived an email from CG Texture's admin, telling her that TRaK is allowed to release the textures under GPL, but she also ignored my question "have you given him your email address?". Both forum threads on this topics have been locked. Leilol made also clear that there will be no official statement on the topic, so this is where I stop telling about it. A new community member named titi recently asked for a free texture reference image host and some of us recommended the public domain image gallery BurningWell.Org to him. He started uploading lots of files to it and even got permission to re-structure the gallery to optimize it for textures! Hagish decided to set up a torrent tracker and to create a torrent of BurningWells' textures for easier downloading and for backup. Although gallery, the system used by BurningWell.Org, might not be optimal for textures and although torrents are not perfect for sharing data that gets new additions frequently: there seems to be a bright future for free as in fancy pants freedom textures. :)

Mystery semi-solved. Whilst the domain appears gone, the Open Racer forum and wiki are still online although just a bit (a really big bit) harder to find. Oh and it's still not open source, which is kinda lame. Meanwhile check out a racing game that is good and exists and Free Software. Like TORCS (solid game, upcoming 1.3.1 release), or Ultimate Stunts (freeform driving fun), or VDrift (potential amazing). There are a few others, but I'd recommend those 3 first. What's your favourite Free Software driving game? Curiously, also, Open Racer was the name of a dead fork of Tux Racer, which now lives on as Extreme Tux Racer, which itself was a fork of PlanetPenguin Racer, also a dead fork Tux Racer. Fork that. You may be forgiven for thinking that the Tux Racer project is cursed, but fortunately the ETR guys are doing a bit better and the game has landed in Ubuntu. A new physics implementation is in progress, and 0.5 should be around sooner rather than later. See developer discussions for more details. Leadgolem's Inventory Concept Scourge Outdoors Ilya's Inventory Concept Scourge development has been a hive of activity lately. There's proposals on a new inventory system, lots of optimizating, and in general the game is looking very cool. Does anybody know much about animation systems? Think having a human model and dynamically overlaying parts of armour or clothing and how that would all tie together with animations etc in 3D. If you know about that, contact the Scourge team as they are looking for advice. There's been a lot of nice new features added to Scourge this year - outdoor areas, cutscenes, new storyline, graphical enhancements galore, and lots of cool models of armour etc. The one bit limitation at the moment is the limitation in model format support, especially character models - currently just md3 is supported. The whole armour-character combination could be a compelling enough reason to see a move to a better format. I like the project a lot and hope to see a few more contributors when such limitations are overcome. Tikiwiki does suck though. Usability nightmare. On a related note, Scourge contributor Ilya created a lovely 2d inventory system which won't be used in Scourge but is really nice. Screenshot on the right, more information and images here. If you have an alternative project please suggest because it'd be a shame to see such lovely pixel art go to waste. Development of netPanzer has been active lately and the current developer is looking for input on the development direction. If you have any affinity for the project, it would be a good time to chime in! Me? I'd love to see single player. I downloaded it... multiplayer only... off. That's a cold and simple truth.

iSoccer Concept Open World Soccer iSoccer ist und... wait... I'm English, why am I sprechen sie Deutsch? Must be Q's influence... iSoccer is a promising project to create an arcade football game in the vein of Sensible Soccer and Football Glory. It was started in April by members of the iTeam project. It's early days but the concept (right) looks beautiful. I hope they can pull it off. The "other" Sensi-like project is Open World Soccer (by the creators of the now discontinued Yoda Soccer project). Fans of the genre should check out both projects and fans-with-skills (aka programmers) should contribute because an awesome little soccer game is sorely missed on the FOSS game scene. On a more ambitious front, Open Football is alive and kicking and had a steady stream of commits over the summer. It's still in concept phase but it's not far from having the foundation to become a playable game. Trying out the SVN version is already quite interesting with quite a few different tests of the engine, although only 1 shows the signs of being a football game (you can run a player around and dribble with the ball). Who is up for a solving a mystery? There's this game, Race Racer. It's a supposedly open source game, definitely exists, but any links of any use are dead (the forums, wiki, www.openracer.org, www.raceracer.org all down). Videos (eg1, eg2) were posted as late as October 2007. It's this promising open source game... just there's no source about? I'll donate a packet of chocolate chip cookies to whomever can get to the bottom of it. Oooo almost forgot. There's a new Allacrost release. All the juicy gossip is on the website, hopefully this signals a recovery for the project that had somewhat stalled over the summer season.

Kazama Kazama is a Pygame-based fighting game engine. [video] It's young and performs rather slowly and the license status of the media included in it's first release is somewhat dubious. In case you had problems following Freedroid(RPG)'s development: they now have an RSS-feed for their updates, which we added to the FreeGameDev news planet. Retribution Engine's level editor There has been an update of the First-person shooter Retribution Engine: Some weapon tuning and two maps. To my knowledge the game still only compiles on windows machines which is unfortunate, as it appears to include a map and a model editor, which might be worth a look. LParis LPairs is a memory game which uses graphics of the Tango Desktop Project. It's just as exciting as every other memory game and I must say that the best thing about it is the user interface library (pretty fading menu fonts). This is something all the LGames shine in. I also just found out via the news planet, that OpenAnno appears to have it's first playable release! And they made a video!! OpenAnno 13 Sept 2008 Mono.XNA is an open source, cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's XNA gaming framework. So far I had to ignore the 84 SourceForge.net-hosted XNA-related projects. This might change now. Thanks to SiENcE for the tip!

Narrator: On first sight it looks like the commercial online role-playing game Ultima Online. On the second the viewer might spot one or another change. Maybe even something special, which doesn't even exist in the original game. This game is named Iris 2, built on top of Ultima Online and is freely available online. It was developed by hobby game developers. It's their hobby, just like others knit pullovers in the evening. Florian Fischer and Iwan Gabovitch develop games in their free time. What's the thrill of developing games on your own? Florian: It's just fun to be creative and to express this creativity. Games are super for that. Iwan: First I stopped playing commercial games and started searching for new, interesting games. I found many freeware games and then came across the open source scene, where also games get developed, where it's easy to contribute, without having to get involved too much. Narrator: Most developers are not professionals but they have lots of potential and ideas, which they want to share and to put into practice with others. Free software is being used, which is available gratis online. For example to create graphics of special effects. For the 3D visualization, Florian works with OGRE. OGRE is open source software, which can be copied, distributed and used without limitation. Working with free software excites the developers. Florian: Others can download our code, can compile games on their own, can try own things and can improve the programm. The principle of open source is nice: I give something and, as I use open source tools, I also take something. Narrator: Usually each developer works seperately on his computer but once a year the hobby developers meet live. The event Dusmania was initiated so that developers could exchange experience, but of course there has to be some actual development too. In nine hours, they had to develop a game. The group of Iwan and Florian created "lalalove", a game in which sounds have to be generated to make people happy. Iwan was responsible for the graphics in lalalove. First he sketches the images, before layouting them on the PC. Somebody who invests so much love and free time into game development could work for commercial game producers, but this doesn't interest the community. Florian: We don't have to follow any rules, we can implement every idea and we can throw it out too. We can be as creative as we want to be and this is fun. We can create prototypes of games and then say "we like this game principle" or maybe someone else in the community likes it and develops it thurther. I find this freedom fascinating. Narrator: One who wants to experience developing games on his/her own, finds a lot of tips on the web. Beginners are also able to get into the scene easily. Free Gamer is an online community for hobby game developers. It consists of a blog, a forum and a wiki. The forum is for discussions. On the wiki articles can be published and freely edited. For example there is a list of open source 3D game engines, which everyone can use for his own games. If someone prefers to play rather than develop, won't be disappointed. Games of all sorts are available on the net. For example the cute SuperTuxKart. Instead of Mario, a penguin drives against the tree. End of transcription. Please not that all text by the Narrator is not freely licensed and it's copyright is owned by 3sat. Please note that simplification and generalization are unavoidable if you want to squeeze a topic into four minutes. There are of course people who are interested in commercial application of open source and there are open source game developers who would like to work in non-free, commercial game developer companies.

Left to right: SiENcE, qubodup Hello friends. Today's post is just a quickie: I (involved in some stuff) and SiENcE (involved in both Iris 2 and OGRE) were interviewed by Cornelia Rettig for 3sat's neues (in German). We talk about open source and hobby game development, visit the Free Gamer blog, the FreeGameDev forum and wiki and show Iris 2, OGRE and SuperTuxKart. I am ever so excited. If I understand correctly, you are able to watch the full show inside a time frame of two weeks. Here's a direct link to a asx (windows media player steam file, Kaffeine was able to play it for me.) You can read these news in the Iris 2 blog too! Also there's an article on 3sat's homepage and you can read an auto-translated English version (using google tools). In case there's interest in an English version of a transcript of the show, I guess I could do it...... just tell so via the contact link at the top of the blog or via posting a comment in the blog or in the forum. A longer post by me is coming up soon by the way. :) One step closer to world domi... ah, that joke is getting weak. :p

Well there was some, but let's tidy it up for a bit. These days following Free Software game news is much easier, since we have planet.freegamedev.net. That place is ace but it means that the motivation to post here has dwindled. Still, for addicts, I suggest you tune in to there. I know I do. For instance, if you did, you'd know that there's an updated version of Yo Frankie! (of Apricot project fame) available for download. Funnily enough, the post is no longer up as there was a problem with it (at least there was for me). Still, here is the download URL, and it uses 0launch which I'm afraid to say I really dislike. You can also check out FreeCol 0.8-alpha2. I like that they are releasing early, releasing often. Future maintainers pay attention! Another project that adopts that practise is Battle for Wesnoth. 1.4.x and 1.5.x updates are out with lots of polish. One wonders how much polish will go into that game before it loses momentum. There was hope that some of the community energy that goes into Wesnoth may move into the Silvertree project but at the moment it's somewhat stalled that did not happen and the lead developer is busy with some Frog-platform-like game called Frogatto (googlecode). JCRPG JCRPG looks ace these days. Lots of updates on the planet for that one. I love the pixelization on this shot :lookright: which enhances the "classic" (old-school) nature of the game experience. It's one of either a magic monkey brush or a depth of field shader. With loads of optimization lately as well means JCRPG won't need a mean machine to run. Penultimately, why not take TORCS 1.3.1-test1 out for a test drive? There's a lot of momentum with TORCS development lately and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised how fun it was the last time I played it. It's a good game. Finally, project admins, did you know that now Sourceforge offers a service called Hosted Apps - that is, they host MediaWiki and phpBB for you, all integrated with SF.net logins. Check out the announcement. Damn, all that effort of mine for nothing.

Levelhead I don't really know yet how to play Levelhead, but it has GPL-ed code and CC-BY-SA-ed art assets. This means it's good, right? Right? Well, I'll try to find out whether or not you can play it without having to cut a LCD display in mouth-sized pieces first. Sandbox co-operative map editing There's news regarding Sandbox, the child-friendly Sauerbraten-based 3D game/engine/editor. A completely freely licensed version is in the works. (Code and media.) So, hopefully we'll have a release soon, which will be includable in Debian for example. I'm very interested in this project, as it's obvious aim is to make content/game-creation a child's play! MonkeyWorld 3D MonkeyWorld 3D is a BSD Licensed scene editor for the jMonkeyEngine which I found through a thread on Radakan's forums. Radakan's WorldTool is currently frozen as the energy is now aimed towards the general MonkeyWorld 3D editor. Maybe even jClassicRPG will benefit from it. :) Speaking of Radakan: There's some tasty new gui design and concept art going on. aurora: not only sexy but also with free inner values Cool, I searched for "open source" on flickr and found a new toy: The aurora open source mixer. It's specifications and driver appear to be CC-BY-licensed. I'm not sure if the license is well suitable for hardware, but it does make the device attractive. I wonder if I can get enough motivation to get my soldering iron out. A GNU/Linux driver seems to be missing.

Quad Fighter Approximately 50 high school students from Denmark have participated in the UNF Game Development Camp, and two of the results have been published under some of the Creative Commons Licenses. The seven teams' common tool was Blender and it's game engine. While the results seem very amateurish, I rather like the idea of involving children in the design of toys. Especially when preformed by non-profit organizations. Pandora logo The ultra-mega-super-duper portable Pandora, the ultimate open source handheld device, seems to become a reality. Playing Quake 2 on a device slightly wider than a CD? Sounds uncomfortable. But in connection with a real keyboard and mouse, this device might be quite fun. In my opinion portable stuff just can't get small enough. Pandora in action. Or get a good-resolution video.

jClassicRPG detail jClassicRPG 'Vigilante Eye' is out for us to get. The game engine is nearing completeness, dialogs and a quest system need implementing. Then we'll be able to slay our first 15 foxes for the lazy shepherd Osgar Lindquist. The following features all-ready work: Fighting: Bash (monsters) and be bashed (by monsters)! Items: Collect gold and pieces of wood from slain foxes! Camping: Rest to regenerate health, energy and mana! Leveling: Spend hours deciding on what stat to increase! And this is where you come into play! Get the release. Timong is waiting for your bug reports, patches and feature requests! =D The visual (and aural) and performance improvements that happened lately are pretty much wow. The terrain now looks very natural compared to earlier versions, there are new animated models, there is a tropical background sound loop. I created a rather long video that shows off some of the new features. (Direct download, 118 MB, recommended) SF.net data mining (har har) I'm currently working on a simple categorization of all the stable and or mature game-related projects hosted by SourceForge.net. Not fun. But the results will hopefully be. I will try to learn from Edwart Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which should have shipped today) to create some nice graphical overviews. If you can recommend me a statistical data visualization application, please do! Block Attack b.q. (before qubodup) I started a theme for the Tetris Attack-clone block attack. The current status can be seen in this video. Criticism is welcome. :) The LÖVE smiley competition, in which you can win an awesome comic book, will end in two weeks. PS: our new-found friends at TIGSource are having a remakes competition. This contestant appears to be willing to release his yet-unnamed game's code and media as free code and art!

Conquest (OpenGL) I think I found the oldest open source game out. It's called Conquest. In development since 1982. That's kinda awesome. It is a real-time, multi-player space warfare game. Both curses and OpenGL clients are provided. It looks a bit like 2D Star Trek ship battles (not stereotyping there, it just does). So, want to be brainier? Well, Brain Workshop might just be the answer. Brain Workshop is a free open-source Python implementation of the Dual N-Back mental exercise. This exercise is the only mental activity that is scientifically proven to improve your short-term memory and fluid intelligence (IQ). The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time. O_o Remember Portalized? I kicked up a bit of a fuss over it several months ago. Well, it has it's own website and forums now, and seems to be coming on a bit. It's not yet open source :'( but a bit of positive encouragement might make that happen. Random one: I thought these faces were quite cool (OpenTTD). There's a new stable release for VDrift. I'm not sure that it's much different in terms of features to the last VDrift release as lately the development effort has been on a refactoring / rewrite of the code (which is progressing well). Also Simutrans 100.0 aka 1.0 got released. This really snuck under the radar as it's a very good open source game and not very well known in comparison to OpenTTD, but it's totally Free Software - something the OpenTTD guys are trying to fix but have a lot more work to do on. The Simutrans team lost their previous forum when switching from one host to another. Which means the Simutrans website is a bit broken (most information was kept in the forums, so many of the links now just don't work). The main issue with the stable 1.0 release is that there is no official release of pak128 (the hi-res graphics pack) for it, although you can try your luck with the nightly builds which does have a section for the latest version of pak128. I'll leave you with a video of Simutrans pak128 although watch out for the dodgy music:

Ludum Dare 12 starts in three hours. There are three lists of hints for python game programmers who are going to join the competition: SolHSA?s, mrfun's and GBGames'. Hints that help you be resourceful, constructive and alive before, during and after the contest. jClassicRPG is getting bigger, prettier and cooler. By the way: Orbit-Hopper does work on my machine. Only the 1.16 build creates segfaults. 1.15 works fine. (Though suffers from extreme slowdown when I try to record it.)

Behold! The Uzebox! Uzebox is a retro and minimal game console, which supposedly will have an open architecture, driver and game soon. It is built for NES controllers and it's driver is written for NTSC. Take a look at this video to witness it's capabilities! PURITY It's now possible to play PURITY with pre-compiled maps! See this thread for instructions. Currently there is half a dozen of maps, on which you can roll around and figure out what the different attacks do. I found experimenting with the weapons very interesting and already developed some techniques for "get as fast as possible from this part of the map to that other part of the map." Also, if you're into minimalistic art, you'll find PURITY to be a tool for creating some sexy screenshots. Hm... three dee canvas... Radakan's team decided to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license for all of it's content. What joy! I'm still waiting for WorldTool's next release. Impatiently. I just red that Nosslak, who contributed to OpenFrag before, offered his skill to the Radakan project. His motivation seems to be the slow progression of OpenFrag. Did you know you can learn to create a game showing a picture of cheese in under five minutes? It's true! True, I tell you! Also, I'm trying to create a snake-like game in Lua. I've been thinking about the concept in the last four days, but I have some kind of mental blockade which keeps me from sitting down and keep on writing these less than a hundred lines of code.

I finally managed to compile and play Be The Wumpus (using the CVS version). I had some trouble finding out how the controls work, but then found out that you don't turn in 90-degree steps and that you have to attack (space) to make the humans squeak in fear. I immediately started hunting down and consuming those two-legged pieces of meat. I am amazed by how this game appeals to your hunting instincts. It's also a game which will give you a break from ruining your eyes, as keeping them closed while playing makes it easier (and more fun). Now I just have to wait untill it's night, so I can go hunting at full darkness! Orbit-Hopper split-screen I tried playing Orbit-Hopper, but it appears that my outdated GeForce 5200 isn't enough. Which is a shame, I'd love to try a pretty and improved version of Skyroads. And Orbit-Hopper is supposed to be just that. It even has split-screen support and a level editor and I imagine both might be impressive. Bughunter2 and Tranberry are working on Burning Dust, which will become a 2D RTS engine and then a game, using Hard Vacuum graphics. There's also a game design/brain storm document in the works. Project Alexandria is a 2D gravity arcade space shooter containing some plot. I find the gravity part somewhat hard, but the overall game rather entertaining. Justinnichol's sci-fi art, fonts and drawings are available under the Creative Commons Attribution license. PURITY PURITY is a minimalistic ioq3-based shooter and looks very interesting to me [video]. I was unable to try it, as there are no GNU/Linux binaries and the required GTKRadiant is not easy to compile. A very resourceful discussion on managing free game projects was started by Brendan on the Dungeon Hack forums. He explains that the most important rules for a game developing community are: Showing off progress Being nice and friendly Using shared code & content repositories Documenting code It also appears that Anna Kournikova is the biggest enemy of volunteer game projects because she will start dating your best coder, making him unavailable for the project. Since I have started giving reading recommendations: this blog will knock your socks off! It's a news blog for the being-developed, non-free* MMO game "love". You will be either impressed by the fresh ideas or by how nifty the author introduces his views, so that you are tricked into thinking he is so right, which at the same time makes you love his game, as it's design follows his views. *I'm talking about this kind of free by the way.

Ruby Early Monday. Pioneer rays of light touched my face like golden hair. It was then that the second Ruby weekend game programming competition came to an end. The results are not impressive, but much more than I had anticipated. The previous Rubyweekend took place only 1.5 months ago, and the weather motivates to spend time outside the reach of game-creation-suitable input devices. Also my humble opinion is that the topic "opposites" was way too liberal. Many games weren't finished, though are playable to some degree. Two of the submitted games had incorrect-case directories/filenames!!!! /me rages !!!!11!! Well, let's blame the weather, shall we? :D Me and kiba wanted to create a simple rts called Playground Wars and we failed. No problem, lesson learned (don't try to make an rts in little time.) No regrets but if I'm to participate in a game creation compo this summer again, I will work for it at night so I can sleep in the sun at daytime! I like Opposite Islands [video]. Here are all the games. You can take a look at the videos of the other contesting games. You can vote too. DungeonFarmer is pretty freaky because it has to do with farming in a dungeon! O_o Super StarHawks Gaiden is awesomely neo-retro [video], but was submitted too late. o_O Regarding other short-time game programming challenges: The next Ludum Dare will happen in 2 weeks and 2 days. It's more than a month until PyWeek #7. I can't find any official PyDay site any more :( In other news: I recorded another video of TORCS (slightly better synchronized), after finding out that there is at least one map that looks rather pretty (by my standards.) Blood Frontier recently started interesting me very much, because it is fun to play. It has great maps and a fine, small weapon selection and it's movement style is definitely something fresh. Give the new alpha a try, it's worth it! [video] The fact that most maps are not just very, but too dark, is something I consider a problem for deathmatch games. I'm currently reading Learn to Program, it teaches via Ruby. I like it because it takes me by the hand without making me feel stupid. Next up will be the Lua Reference Manual. When I'm done with that, hopefully Python 3000 will be ready for use and learning. I just checked if I covered in this post everything I have to share and realized that this is about 10%. Next post soon I guess.

TORCS 1.3.1 It has been a while since the last time I gave The Open Racing Car Simulator a try and this time I had unexpectedly much fun with it. Though some things are strange about it: the game generally runs smoothly, except for some rare, sporadic lags which make controls problematic for a second. There are great textures in the game but some of them are just bad (probably heritage from darker times.) I like the track's layouts but I wish there was an environment artist who would spice up TORCS' landscapes. Still, I think it's great. There is a lack of a damage model, but it's still fun to practice an aggressive driving style sometimes. :) Oh yeah, I nearly forgot to tell you that I made a stupid little gameplay video. I tried to compile the racing simulation from CVS and failed, but fortunately it is available in binary forms for Win/Lin/Mac and is easy to install. One unusual aspect of the game's installer is that you can to choose to not install the unfree car models (although I don't know for sure how free the TORCS team's definition of free media is.) Dungeon Hack landscape Dungeon Hack, a spiritual remake of Daggerfall, will be blessed with an editor some time soon. Hopefully they will make the jump from awesome landscape generator to kick-butt role-playing game! I also hope there will be a GNU/Linux version available soon. The only other application of which I'm eagerly waiting for a GNU/Linux port is FxGen. Other than that, there's not much to say about Dungeon Hack. The current aim is programming and not already bother with gameplay/visual details. I think this is a good sign: they're not trying to rush things or to do everything at the same time. You can get version Alpha build 23 of Digital Paint Paintball 2. The game is one of those, which I never figured out how to play. Problem was with the last version I tried, that I was unable to disable the too-much-for-my-gfxcard-water/reflection-effects. FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 town's new look FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 has lots of new features: Level changes and additionsWeapon additions and balancingPrograms (spells) balancing and a new skillNew music!Engine improvements (for example performance)Editor improvements (for example undo/redo functions) I need to find some time for checking out that editor thingey! CatchemRPG detail CatchemRPG is supposed to become a Pokemon games-like game. Can't say I'm very interested, but the sprites do like rather nice (wonder where they are from. RPGMaker XP?) Also it's written in Java, so you don't loose much time giving it a shot. PS: Apricot aka Yo Frankie! (sight) would very much like you to animate a character for them.

Surt's goblin Surt contributed the first model to OpenDungeons (and it looks good!) The model also was quickly incorporated by Timong into jClassicRPG. Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb) released the first version of Choria, which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest. Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux! RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :) The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ). lalalove at dusmania Part of the dusmania was a overnight games creation competition. Our result (made with LÖVE) is lalalove (working title), a game inspired by Lost Garden's Celestial Music. Basically you connect stars, asteroids and planets, to create musical compositions. The current state isn't polished but playable and fun for some seconds. We're definitely going to make it kick ass! Also: No more game videos on Vimeo allowed. Not sure if they permit ones of games you did yourself.

Nebula from FreeOrion So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today? On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae. Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds! I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE. You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic! OpenDungeons' map editor OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome... So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS! There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer. But I have two problems with the game: 1. The controls are explosively sensitive and I was so far unable to overcome the first platform sequence in the first level. 2. The turning speed of my character is depending on the distance between bob and the camera, so when bob is standing back to a wall, it will be impossible to aim because the turning speed will be 40 degrees per 1 point mouse movement... This apparently will not change: Please note: the camera is not going to get much better than this. Minor niggles, etc. can be ironed out, but a full blown, intelligent and dynamic camera, as found in many multi million dollar budget games is not going to happen. You can take a look at the first level of the game and at my issues with it in this gameplay video. Also let me tell you that I appreciate very much, how Parallel Realities gave Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid a nice story and setting, and made it a fun to play game. So I'm not giving up on the 3d platform/shooter just yet! I just found out that ja2-stracciatella, is based on the unfree (although open) Jagged Alliance 2 source code. :( FIFE's map editor FIFE 2008.1 has been released! The flexible, isometric 2d game engine has seen many changes: It is now licensed under the LGPL (GPL before), dependencies have been removed (no more tinyxml), it features a small example game and muuuuuuch moooooooore. What *really* makes me interested in this release, is the inclusion of a map editor! I unfortunately haven't been able to compile FIFE (apparently due to an error in the unstable Debian sid distribution), so as soon as I install Arch Linux, I'll be bombarding you with mapping videos again! FIFE Is no Fallout Emulator btw! Nice render for OpenAnnoSpeaking of FIFE: OpenAnno 2008.0 was completed. There have been some art and code and documentation additions. And new teammates also! :) OpenAnno will be represented at a german indy game dev meeting that I'll be visiting this weekend. This just in: Simutrans100.0 (r1867) has been released! Last time I checked it, the game was a pretty Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone with pretty graphics and a deadly/unfair AI. I find their

Frank and mushroom from Apricot There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping. Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be. The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space backgrounds, which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actually the only thing able to make the industry pay attention to Blender and Crystal Space. ) Nobody cares about story and depth and such after all, right? However, the svn repository will be opened this weekend and who knows? Maybe with some community help, the project will reach a higher level of what is now intended before it's deadline of 31, July? FreeCol map editor FreeCol 0.8.0-alpha has been released. It features displaying of settlement names, soft unit movement and main menu music. FreeCol and it's editor are both written in Java, which saved me some compilation minutes. The map editor is pretty simple and unproblematic to use. Battle Tanks 0.8-rc1 has been shipped! Capture the flag! Team deathmatch! Internet play! The few existing servers are empty though, so why don't ya go and fill them up? Get it here in Windows-binary or source flavor! The team asks for feedback, which is pretty common with open source projects and might be even superfluous to tell, but it always gives me a good feeling when teams ask for criticism on their products. In case you have never before seen Battle Tanks in action, I recorded a video of AI-aided defend-the-base-style cooperative gameplay. Battle Tanks' maps can be edited via Tiled, as demonstrated below. The editor is a general-purpose tile-based map editor written in Java, which means that it's cross-platform and relatively easy to run. It's feature-rich but also pretty simple to use : there are layers and you draw tiles on them. Effective! It resembles RPG Maker in some ways, but as a map editor it is far more advanced. Item placement in Battle Tanks is being done via a specialized, also pretty simple editor, which has no documentation as far as I can tell and which tends to crash a lot. Using Tiled to edit Battle Tanks maps

Frank and mushroom from Apricot There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping. Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be. The apricot team comes from a Blender background, which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actually the only thing able to make the industry pay attention to Blender and Crystal Space. ) Nobody cares about story and depth and such after all, right? However, the svn repository will be opened this weekend and who knows? Maybe with some community help, the project will reach a higher level of what is now intended before it's deadline of 31, July? FreeCol map editor FreeCol 0.8.0-alpha has been released. It features displaying of settlement names, soft unit movement and main menu music. FreeCol and it's editor are both written in Java, which saved me some compilation minutes. The map editor is pretty simple and unproblematic to use. Battle Tanks 0.8-rc1 has been shipped! Capture the flag! Team deathmatch! Internet play! The few existing servers are empty though, so why don't ya go and fill them up? Get it here in Windows-binary or source flavor! The team asks for feedback, which is pretty common with open source projects and might be even superfluous to tell, but it always gives me a good feeling when teams ask for criticism on their products. In case you have never before seen Battle Tanks in action, I recorded a video of AI-aided defend-the-base-style cooperative gameplay. Battle Tanks' maps can be edited via Tiled, as demonstrated below. The editor is a general-purpose tile-based map editor written in Java, which means that it's cross-platform and relatively easy to run. It's feature-rich but also pretty simple to use : there are layers and you draw tiles on them. Effective! It resembles RPG Maker in some ways, but as a map editor it is far more advanced. Item placement in Battle Tanks is being done via a specialized, also pretty simple editor, which has no documentation as far as I can tell and which tends to crash a lot. Using Tiled to edit Battle Tanks maps

WorldTool r3 for Radakan Today I finally gave WorldTool (release 3) a try, which is a map editor for Radakan. To use the tool, one has to download it, extract it and then run java -Djava.library.path=. -jar WorldTool.jar. The tool allows you to create a map and to raise and lower the terrain and paint textures on it via brushes. You can place objects on it, which will automatically be at the correct height relative to the ground. It is fun to play around with (though not for too long, as the art asset is tiny and I don't know how to import additional media and because all I can do is make a map, not walk with a character on it or place items or monsters. - Mind you, the editor is in an early stage.) While using it, I got the thought that if such tools were developed enough to be able to produce content to truly enrich games, their ease of use would attract many potential contributers and could turn a player into a contributor. Even if the advanced features (like creating characters with dialog options) would be more complicated, the simple things would be easy to do, which means that there will be motivation enough to learn how to do the more complicated work. I haven't given much thought to game-specific editors before, but I will take a closer look at the ones I can find and figure out where their limitations are and if there are any faults with them and write my findings here. Please tell me if you know of any such tools (besides the ones for SilverTreeRPG, Sauerbraten, SuperTuxKart and FreedroidRPG that is. ;) ) In not so dashing news: you can vote for Apricot's official name now. The suggestions are kind of cute ("point blank frank", "frankie?s reign of terror") but I really would prefer "Apricot". Do you like the name "Bick Buck Bunny"? I don't too much..

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world. Blood Frontier, the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release. Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think). There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, this and his other portaits are available under an open source license (CC-by-SA or GPL3) and you can find out more information, lavish praise, or even make requests (!) in this topic in the FreeGameDev forums. In other fantasy-game news, DungeonHack progress continues and they finally have the project in SVN (direct link) so interested people can check out their progress which is apparently pretty good. It's a Daggerfall-inspired game, which can only be a good thing. Did you know FreeOrion will soon have 3D combat? Check out this topic on the Ogre forums for some preview screenshots. In the meantime, they released 0.3.10 with the usual raft of bug fixes and minor improvements. Downloads are available, from different places, for Linux and Windows. The White Chamber Studio Trophis have released the source for their very lovely looking game The White Chamber. It's an anime themed 2D point and click horror adventure game. It requires the WinterMute engine and I'm not sure whether that's Free Software although it seems the source is available but under no specific license. The White Chamber source is at the bottom of the Studio Trophis downloads page. It looks like it's all Windows-only =( but I could be wrong. A while back I made some hullabaloo about Portalized, a perhaps-to-be-open-source better-than-Portal engine. Well, the guy working on it (who, by the way, is only 16 - shame on us all who are older and less productive than him) now has a blog with some interesting commentary on his efforts as well as some gorgeous screenshots. It doesn't look like it'll be open source any time soon but I don't think he's ruled it out either, and now he has help so it'll be worth watching. Version 0.1 is on the way, so there's something to look forward to. Well, hopefully that satisfies your Free game news needs for another day or so...

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll, then download this .blend file, open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :) Apricot, first demo An OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release version was posted. Everybody is welcome to help the project providing a decent release by testing it. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new maps and models. The GearHead 1/2 homepage has been updated a while ago. It now looks pretty pretty and has a sexy RSS feed. The GearHead games are Roguelike titles (which I find not that cool) involving Mechs (which I find cool) of the Japanese kind (meh). Totally unrelated: a webcomic based on the games' setting has started. PS: In case you are interested in using glc as a game recording tool on GNU/Linux systems, this Arch Linux newsletter contains some usage hints for the cool application.

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge. Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums! There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG. The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG. Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available. Video of Slune, made with glc glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap, istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that manages to records audio on my machine. It's also easy to install! (Hints: cat /proc/cpuinfo to find out what flags to use, O2 is written with an uppercase o, if you don't know where to install to install it to /usr/ and also execute the install script as root.) Using it is easy too! Just run glc-capture game-name and press Shift+F8 to start/stop recording. There is even a script provided, which will convert the glc files to mp4 (attention, non-free), the preferred format of Vimeo. If you know how to use ffmpeg to create an Theora/OGG video, you can probably export to that format instead. glc is great! I want you to use it! I've used it a lot already. It is to my knowledge the first Linux direct rendering capturing tool that does not suck! If you have any trouble whatsoever with it, you're invited to ask for help in this thread. (There's also #glc on irc.freenode.net.) Speaking of game videos, I discovered some game-exclusive video hosting services! GameVee even supports OGG/Theora! One more thing: Apricot is looking for animators!

Today I gave DccNiTghtmare a try. I learned about the project on the LGT.DccNiTghtmare (aka DNT) is a project to make a Free (as in free speech) 3D single player RPG in a sarcastic post-apocalyptical world. Any suggestions are welcome, just put them at our forum. How convenient! I'm a big fan of apocalyptic settings, single-player games, sarcasm, free software and projects that encourage participation! DccNiTghtmare First impressions after starting: Weird music, strange resolutions limitation, interesting races (Headbanger, Strange Autistic, Mutant Human Cricket, Human Llama). The controls are contumacious and the graphics engine is either slow or unstable (it either crashes or slows down to unplayable speed when I exit the first area.) This means that I can't say much about playability. The clown care seems right though. So if you're into bizarre humor, you should get DNT, just to be able to read the race/class descriptions. XUT screenshot detail DNT is a project by DNTeam, "a group of developers and artists involved on creating free (as in libre, livre) games projects." Another game they're working on is XUT, a Button football game. It looks like fun, but there is no release yet. Unfortunately it is under "not so active development."

Winning a game of NO NO is a fun little puzzle game [video]. It is built on top of LÖVE, which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted! I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed. The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet. The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release. An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht, a TDE-based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it so far because the last time it caught my attention, compiling code was a large burden for me. Now I won't try it as it appears to be depending on non-free Nvidia and Fmod libraries. Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1 It seems that the Apricot team has the same problems that I have when recording with recordMyDesktop: The recorded field doesn't fit the selected window, which results in capturing of unwanted space above and below the targeted window. Warsow's developers started accepting donations. They want to use it for making participation in an own LAN party cheaper. I'm becoming more and more uncertain about the ultimate goal of the project. Is it profit? A fun game? An elitist community? Being popular?

Winning a game of NO NO is a fun little puzzle game [video]. It is built on top of LÖVE, which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted! I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed. The Apricot project is riping with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet. The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release. An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht, a TDE-based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it so far because the last time it caught my attention, compiling code was a large burden for me. Now I won't try it as it appears to be depending on non-free Nvidia and Fmod libraries. Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1 It seems that the Apricot team has the same problems that I have when recording with recordMyDesktop: The recorded field doesn't fit the selected window, which results in capturing of unwanted space above and below the targeted window. Warsow's developers started accepting donations. They want to use it for making participation in an own LAN cheaper. I'm becoming more and more uncertain about the ultimate goal of the project. Is it profit? A fun game? An elitist community? Being popular?

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had! FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...) I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5. FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released. Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing! The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community. These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos! OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound. After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not a windows emulator. Remember Mars - Land of No Mercy? I at least twice mourned it's death. It seems that the game likes to revive a lot. Animations seem to be the aim at the moment. Little video showing off what the engine can do right now PS!!!: Warzone 2100's music and videos are now licensed under the GPL! I am so excited! Warzone 2100 is a great game that long ago was a proprietary one. The real-time strategy game is much fun, though I felt that long gameplay was dull without music and that the story wasn't very touchable without videos. Joy!!! I also discovered the Warzone 2200 project. It appears to be aiming for improving the game engine.

Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [video], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [video], satoshi's console-based footracer [video], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [video], ippa's Zombie Horde [video], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [video] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught. The submitted code had to be released under an OSI-approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame, which is a SDL-based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu. Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winnerAnother competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare, which is the granddaughter of PyWeek. You can download an archive (.7z) of all contributions. Or pick them individually. Or just watch some of them. I also seriously recommend two out of the three PyDay #1 games. They're in the video at the end of this post. While some games turn out terribly (it will be either less than ugly graphics or inhuman controls), gems tend to appear on such contests. I love the idea of brain-storm programming, even though results are likely to be buggy and incomplete, the important thing is that a playable model of a game exists. It allows to see the potential for fun. Port Town For example I enjoy playing Port Town much more than I should. It's a game based on boring random numbers, where you get a random number of units and position them in a part of the town, where they fight and win randomly. The tiny detail that zombies will convert humans to their own kind is what makes the game shine for me. Also the zombies start on the graveyard and the pirates start on a ship. It makes so much sense! I see a lot of potential in this minimal Risk-like strategy game. It only needs a bit more complexity and then a bit more graphics. Another example is The CopyPirate, which is no fun to play at all for me, but which has a cool scenario. You're a pirate, who has to steal some music and escape to the intertubes while avoiding the RIAA's Zombies! How awesome is that? I hope this scenario will find it's way into a decent satirical game someday. There is one problem with short time game contests' results though: documentation. I think it's a big deal, as many contest contributors won't be willing to spend any more time on their quickie creations while being the ones who understand the game's code best. (The reasons will be "The source is sooooo dirty!!", "I would, but I got this totally awesome idea for my next game!", "I'll rewrite it instead, rly!!", "I don't care if you like it, I don't!", "I'm lazy!" and "I can only work under pressure!") But at least the small size of the games protects against total unsuitability for further development by others. I'm looking forward to PyHour. Less is more! PyDay #1 games (the third one is the coolest!).

HexTD close viewHex Tower Defence is a Java-powered tower defense game inspired by the unfree, flash-based VectorTD. You can play it inside the browser or grab hold of the code and install/compile it with the help of these instructions. Gazelle desktopHexTD uses the SVG Salamander Java vector library. It's author is Mark McKay, who is also working on an animation suite, which supports Scalable Vector Graphics: Gazelle. Gazelle is a movie editor that makes it easy for you to create short keyframed animations on your computer. There are some tutorial videos available. I look forward to playing around with Gazelle, as I'm very interested in using SVGs to create (animated) game media or to even use them directly in games. HexTD gameplay (likely to be found boring ;) - also there's no sound by default)

krank snake, stone, links and anchors krank is a game of dexterity, being somewhere between Breakout and billiard, where the aim of each level is to shove floating stones towards compatible static stones. You control a short chain of stones with your mouse to achieve that. While the game's visual and audible style is as simple as the rules are, there is no shortage of variety. Different level layouts provide enough challenge and different gameplay elements (the interactions between different types of floating stones with different types of static stones) are introduced at a reasonable paste. If you find the hardness curve too flat or simply don't like one level: the game permits you to skip one level ahead the last finished one. Another important aspect, which keeps me playing, is the variety of look and sound. Each level has it's own pretty background and there are different sound themes, which give a subtle but very effective feedback of what is happening on the game field. Thorsten Kohnhorst is the programmer behind krank. He created some other games, which I will introduce in the future. Michael Abbing is the game's sound designer. Nine others contributed to the game's level designs. The game was written in python and packages are available for OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux (thanks to elcugo for the latter!) The code and media appears to be in the public domain. If you ever enjoyed a puzzle, billiard, golf or an arcade game before, you definitely should give it a try. Especially with it being so easy to start playing (see package links above.) By the way: I haven't seen a game menu integrated so well in a game since the unfree Psychonauts! The only feature I'm missing is a save function. Have a look at the gameplay in the video below but I must warn you that the sound effects (which I am unable to capture) are an important element of the game and that the video (especially with it's visual quality) is a bad representative of the actual game. krank gameplay video - pardon the lack of sounds :(

FreeOrion star map detail Cheer, for a new release of the awesomely pretty FreeOrion has seen the light! This time both Windows and GNU/Linux builds are provided. Here are the features: New and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.) Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape Reworked drag-and-drop design screen New ship parts Python AI interface improvements Minor UI improvements Bug fixes Check out the Roadmap to see what to expect from future releases! FreeOrion icon art OpenGL will be required in coming versions (currently it's semi-required). While I know that there are people who have old machines and countries where it's non-trivial to get reasonably fast hardware, I can't say that I blame anyone for using hardware-acceleration and even making it a requirement. I think it's rather the job of Libraries to allow programming games which make use of OpenGL and will automatically disable effects and use software rendering when no acceleration is available. SuperTuxKart 0.5 SuperTuxKart 0.5 has been released. Along with new and improved tracks, a new game mode, some new music and translations have been added (German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Swedish). Mac/Lin/Win binaries are available. track-editor I only realized SuperTuxKart's activity after their forum was created on the FreeGameDev forums. One example is the creation of the tile-based track-editor by Baskervil. There's also interest in making SuperTux switch accessible. A switch is an assistive technology device which replaces the use of a mouse, keyboard, controller or joystick which severely physically or cognitive disabled may find difficult to use. In other news: New versions of Alien Arena, Everborn, LordsAWar and Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer. My compliments to nath for being very report-active on LGT. :)

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music. The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. However it will turn out, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :) Last post I told you about Ardentryst. There's a mute gameplay video, I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it. Bear Factory A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games. l-echo, an open source clone of the abstract puzzle game Echochrome, is now 0.1.0 versions old. I haven't given it a try yet but it does look very nifty. The 1000 USD expensive tank simulator game is stuck at 52.8% of it's financial goal but I'm sure that sooner or later some generous comrades will throw some pennies in. No sign of apricot opening it's repository yet, but in a recent video some features of apricot's blender branch are shown off: object snapping shadow map baking. These improvements are supposed to ease game/level-design and are likely to find their way into the main blender branch sooner or later. You can get pre-built blender builds of all kinds and colors on GraphicAll. There's also this YA2DGE LÖVE. What is impressive about it is the homepage's look and it's realistic roadmap. A clean look and decent sense of humor sure are a good way to catch my attention. LÖVE made me find Face Me and Scream. Thanks, LÖVE. Oh by the way, have you noticed the blog's new look? :) Let us know what you think.

ApricotThe Apricot open game project is going to open their code/media repository. Packagers are needed to help the project: if you know something about packaging and bug tracking/solving write to us ! Apply to: res[-a-t-]crystalspace3d.org OpenFrag 0.5.2 has been released on the project's fifth anniversary. You can get it here and read about the features in this thread. ArdentrystArdentryst by Jordan Trudgett is a side-scrolling fantasy rpg that focuses on story and character development. It's python-based and I was able to run it just like that! (it's only one level though.) It even has voices!! (well, ok - only in the intro.) BBB box The open movie project Big Buck Bunny (BBB) DVD lay in my mailbox (the real one) today! The movie is what I expected it to be: cute, pretty, shallow, a bit funny. It runs for eight minutes and contains fifteen seconds of grotesque post-credits 'outtake' which some of you might find offensive. O_o BBB - A graphical glitch! I'm disappointed about one thing though: The movie lacks sounds! Many scenes feel incomplete with no ear-feed. This problem would probably not exist, if Freesound, which recently reached a sound file count of fifty thousand, finally would support the use of the cc-by license and the public domain. Watch BBB in Free Gamer neTV now: I'm sorry, this isn't very open source games related, is it? A bit maybe.

Well, no blog in a while so I'll pitch in. The big release was Scourge 0.20 which is really turning into a nice game. It's one of my favourite projects, not least because of the regular releases and the RPG theme and it's a complete game (12 chapters of storyline). It's surely worthy of being listed on the FreeGameDev complete games page! Version 0.20 was probably the biggest feature packed release yet, and the game now has numerous active contributors. Open City 0.06dev1 got released in April, which I didn't see mentioned anywhere. Nice to see the project continuing at a steady pace. Grab it from the project downloads on Sourceforge (the website does not link it directly) and see what new features are going into Open City on the project's development page. Howitzer Skirmish now has a website. It's the tank game with full physics simulation of the tracks: In the physics simulation, a motor drives the sprocket, which in turn collides with all the links in the track. Each link in the tracks, is a fully simulated rigid body. Blocks is a fun and free sof