Gaming Daily A-Z

I'll start by noting I messed up my last post. Despite making the post on the 23rd, it was dated the 18th so any frequent readers may have easily missed it. So, for those who haven't yet read it, check out Freeciv3 Part I . Freecol Now, onto the real meat. In the last week, Freecol 0.5 was - at long last - released. The original colonization had a cult following and Freecol is only going to enhance that community. It's got a lot of potential. It's got some very nice visuals for a Free game and they're improving with every release. I've been lazy here and used a screenshot from 0.4 since I'm at work and can't load it up to take a new one, although to me it looks the same in 0.5 for that part of the game. The game is now very playable with plenty of depth but there's still a few negatives for me: The ugliness of Java does sneak through in places despite heavy UI customization. (God damn the default Java UIs are ugly - are Sun developers blind?) ...

There was an interesting discussion over on the Freeciv mailing lists on the goals of the project . Freeciv developer Per started the conversation by stating what he believes is the main obstacle to Freeciv development at the moment, the clash between single player and multiplayer goals: We can make a very good single player game... Or we can create a game that is fun in multiplayer... Because once we need to take into account the needs of higher amounts of players and a competitive and possibly hostile environment, the needs of single player must suffer... ...we must decide which is more important, single player or multiplayer. I have no problem saying single player is more important... [since] multiplayer is inherently broken and unfixable without a redesign making multiplayer the priority. He goes on to give more justification in the email for his beliefs, which I completely agree with. I do not, however, agree with the conclusion that only one of single player or multiplayer aspec...

UFO:AI Hot off the press is the 2.0 rc3 release from the UFO:AI team , which is shaping up as a flagship open source game after it briefly floundered due to developer desertion last year. This is another example of why indie games being open source is a Good Idea (tm). Had this been closed source, the promising initial release (tech demo 1) would have the end of the line. Fortunately it was the beginning of an era. Another important Free strategy game was updated today - Warzone Resurrection . If you haven't played this yet, I don't know what you are waiting for. It's about as polished as you will come across for an open source game, mainly due to it's commercial roots. When it rains, it pours. TA:Spring , the advanced Total Annihilation engine, was updated on the 17th to version 0.72b1. The changelog is impressive, with the main new features being a new shield system and custom explosions, both mainly for modders. I'm hopeful that TA:Spring will turn into...

Windows is not a platform oft associated with open source software, but we can not escape from the fact that the majority of computers world-wide run it as the primary operating system. Free game developers mostly seem to run a Linux variant , but there is an increasing number of developers on Windows who are coming around to the open source mentality without subscribing to the need to run Linux . Some of the tools a developer will use are dictated by the chosen programming language. Outside of that, here is a run-down of my favourite tools for developing on Windows, most of which I use on a daily basis as part of my day job. All of these programs are Free Software . Planning Got ideas? Freemind helps you "mind map" them into a tangible format. I find Freemind incredibly useful for both existing and new projects. It helps you intuitively organise your thoughts and I use it for developing feature plans as well as iterating new ideas into a coherent state. When I have m...

There is a release imminent for Mars: Land of No Mercy , which got it's own .org domain name recently. This isometric strategy mech game is developing at a steady pace and sees version 0.1.2 released next week. New Ecksdee Level The next version of Ecksdee is shaping up nicely. There's some preview screenshots of a new level for the next version (0.0.9) one of which can be seen here. There's another level in development which is more ambitious and targeted for the 0.1 release of Ecksdee. The Ecksdee developers will be at the Crystal Space conference this weekend in Aachen, Germany. An Ecksdee talk should take place on Sunday at 1pm local time. There's another stunt-like Free game on the horizon: Sturmbahnfahrer . The game describes itself as, "Simulated obstacle course for automobiles." As such, the gameplay is oriented around using physics to complete the levels rather than racing. There's a curious new freeware game based on OGRE . The Bl...

There's a significant update to VDrift , the open source drift racing game. Now it has a decent selection of cars and tracks, 19 and 12 respectively, to play on and development seems to be picking up pace. This is an excellent game and I urge any people interested in racing games to get involved. With a bit of community dedication this could be turned into a really polished commercial quality racing game. At the moment they are looking for people to post screenshots . There is only a binary for Linux of the latest release but I'm sure other platforms will follow sooner rather than later. Loose Cannon is a 3d Gauntlet-style post modern shoot-em-up. The previous release (0.4) was promising but shaky. I'll have to see what this update is like. I see Eternal Lands has had an update too. I've known about this update for a couple of weeks, just forgot to post about it. Still, I'm not an EL fan. I don't really understand what motivates people to play a game ...

The 0.5 release of Freecol is imminent ! I've been looking forward to this. Freecol is one of the best looking open source games with a very artistic interface. This will be the first really playable version of Freecol, and as such I expect it to take off as a project after this point. Good open source games always have a critical mass point where they blossom from one or two man efforts into community driven projects. This, I feel, is that point for Freecol. However, there is a twist! Well, I'm just being dramatic, but another Colonization project has cropped up. Proclaiming to be Colonization II, copyright violations withstanding, Swecol2 profresses to be an open source sequel to the 1994 classic. There is even a teaser trailer. On the face of things, Swecol2 looks promising despite being graphically (and seemingly gameplay-wise) inferior to Freecol. However, there is some cynism about and the fact that this is not yet open source makes is cause for suspicion: ......

...if you wanna be a record breaker! Oooo ooo... </singing> One of the great things about Free software games is that people are free to dedicate themselves to whatever makes them happy. Check out this ship, the Atlantia , created for a Vega Strike mod [not yet published]. Speaking of Vega Strike, the musings over the last couple of weeks suggest a new 0.4.x release [the current engine] later on in the year. I don't think the real juice [the 0.5 OGRE -based engine] will come until 2007, but when it does it will be good. Check out the screenshot to the right, a sample of planet shaders that VS developer klauss is working on. More images here . That's simply beautiful. There's a new dungeon game in town. Sadly it is a Doom 3 mod so it's not really free, but we know what happens with iD engines so there is hope! The game is Dungeon Doom and hopefully it will evolve into a stellar Free game in the future. Another interesting mod [UT2004 this time...

I came across Zak McKracken and the Alien Rockstars the other day. It's a GPL cross-plaform fan-made sequel to Zak McKracken , a Lucasarts game. Whilst browsing for information on Zak1, I came across another ZM sequel, Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space . It looks even better than ZMAR, but is Windows only and seemingly only freeware. There's a rather impressive trailer available. It reminds me a little of the also-impressive The Silver Lining project (formerly known as King's Quest 9). Simutrans In other freeware news, Simutrans version 0.89 is now available . It's a preview release but this game is constantly moving forward and seems to update every few weeks, a practise I approve of. There's also a rather funky hand drawn "sketch" graphics set for Simutrans, shown in the screenshot here. A topic I would like to cover more in the future is the sharing of content between Free game developers. Since volunteer resources are predictably limit...