Gaming Daily A-Z

Somehow I'm missed yesterday... shit happens! My favourite RPG project Scourge now comes with outdoor areas which look rather promising . The progress on this project has been relentless which I really enjoy seeing. All it needs is some modellers to start producing some nice character models and some better decorations and it will look beautiful. I think the somewhat light-hearted premise for the storyline might be putting off potential players though so it would also be nice to see somebody product a mod for this game with a more serious storyline. Scourge is designed to be moddable. Zaxxon Remake is a remake of the Sega game [surprisingly called] Zaxxon . The remake runs on both Linux and Windows but does not seem to be open source. I have contacted the author to encourage him otherwise. Anyway it's an isometric shoot-em-up, something not too well represented in the Free gaming world. I can think of a handful but they are all quite shallow games, perhaps Chromium B...

Want to simulate running your own college or university? You can . And it's open source. I post this purely out of amazement that somebody would program such a "game". Perhaps a more relevant simulation game is, er, running your own game design company. GameBiz: The Magical Years and GameBiz 2 ( download ) provide such an experience, but only freeware and on Windows. Again, posted purely out of intrigue. Back on to more, er, better-er things... version 0.3 of SuperTuxKart is imminent. :-) There has been a spike in activity of late as the developers try to push out the next version, which now uses SDL instead of PLIB . There is an RC available for download (released quietly earlier in May) if you want to help test things. The main weakness of the game is now the quality of the tracks. Hopefully a new release will attract a few people interested in creating some good new tracks for the game. They also need help creating a Windows build for the next release. Cut...

Haha, forgot to give the post a title so Blogger gave it this interesting one instead! Damnation of the Gods Damnation of the Gods is a project to make a game similar to Dungeon Master and the Eye of the Beholder series. For those not familiar with them, they are pseudo 3D RPGs - that is you have a first person view but you can only move on a grid (i.e. north, south, east, west) and the graphics are generally 2D sprites for both the environment and game characters. Unlike roguelikes the game is realtime so waiting around is not advisable. There's only a couple of screenshots but they show a fair amount of progress. You can play the latest version (0.17) on Linux or (via MingW) Windows. The author slightly confuses the term freeware with open source on the homepage but DotG is definitely open source. Eye of the Beholder II was one of my favourite games when I was growing up. It was challenging, immersive, and had excellent graphics for it's time. It was a tough game, ...

How wonderfully ironic that on the 1st anniversary of the inception of Free Gamer, I forgot to actually post. Lack of time and focus on work robbed me of the time required to bring you the usual high quality rambling. Another thing that seems forgotten is the Free Gamer Awards I so enthusiastically thought up a few weeks back. Fear not, as soon as I am done procrastinating planning them properly, it will all come together. Fortunately they are entitled the Free Gamer Awards 2007 which gives me another 6 months to execute them. *grin* As you may have noticed, I called this post, "A bit about me." I won't be talking about myself - sorry to disappoint you - just a bit about this blog. (Yes, a blog can have a sense of self, y'know.) I feel that one of the reasons FG has people reading it daily is because I stay fairly on-topic. I don't talk about much else other than Free Software games (ok, throw in a few freeware titles) and the aspects surrounding the devel...

Over on the Ubuntu forums, I came across a post looking for whelp with a new game - Project Kilo is an ambitious new project to create a commercial grade RPG. Arkhart Now, often I see people talk about how they want to create the next Oblivion and give up when they find out that just using just a paperclip and some bluetack only gets you a bluetacky paperclip and really creating something like an RPG take significant dedication, talent, and desire. As such, it is easy to poor water on these little fires by replying to such threads with a dose of reality - that commercial grade RPGs take a team of paid developers and artists years to create. And that previous efforts have just stagnated to the point of no hope (think Arkhart ). However I remember when Hero of Allacrost was just the dream of their lead developer Roots and he was canvasing for support and plugging away regardless of negative responses. Now look where they are - Allacrost is really shaping up nicely and turning into ...

Woah a nice new Free game! Irrlamb is described by it's developer(s) as "a 3D game that probably involves a lot of physics and frustrating gameplay." It looks really awesome. Check out the gameplay video . Think Marble Madness and add lots of fun extra ways to interact with objects using your spherical token. I especially liked the scene depicting the player sphere on top of a larger sphere and using cog-like mechanics to make it roll. Irrlamb looks fun and when I next get a free moment you can be sure I'll be trying it - it's available for Linux and Windows. Irrlamb just goes to show that with a bit of thought, you can take an old concept and put an original spin on it. Pun intended. ;-) I saw that one over on happypenguin.org and there's a few other game updates on the 'tome. I won't duplicate them here. One not there yet is the latest Stendhal release, version 0.60 of this console-style MMORPG. Language is a funny thing, console meaning ...

There's a new Ultimate Stunts release, 0.7.1, which adds a few nifty features and fixes a few commonly reported bugs. This open ended driving game continues it's history of steady development, something I like to see in open source games. Our newly incepted project Fortress continues to attract interest and we now have a wiki collecting together information on the both Castles (the game that inspires Fortress) and how we want to see Fortress evolve. Hopefully in the next few weeks a bit of prototyping will occur, but a bit of planning in the meantime should scope out the project nicely. Fortress will also provide me an opportunity to write some articles on the issues that affect open source game development. (I was tempted to write "successfully developing an open source game" but then that's just setting myself up.) Darsana Somebody brings up Darsana in the Ubuntu forums. They call it beautiful , well, that's perhaps a little strong. It does look inte...

Unofficial builds are much like zombies, who rise out of the dirt to seek out human flesh and consume it. Only unofficial builds usually come from the community and don't always kill the black dude and the crazy but not-so-cute lady. Instead they give people access to [the latest version of] games. And don't walk with some form of broken-bone induced limp. Although they may have bugs! And zombies tend to have bugs! Maggots infested in their now-defunct brains and flies swarming around their rotten carcasses. The similarities are uncanny. It could be worse . Anyway... now that I feel relatively normal, the point was... SoulFu There's a Linux build of SoulFu posted on the SoulFu forum. Some complaints about low resolutions and issues with widescreen monitors but otherwise it looks good. The main reason Aaron Bishop released SoulFu as kind of open source (i.e. not Free but free with source, we must be pedantic about such matters lest we fall afoul of the various p...

Well it seems this blog and the Free Gamer forums combination have had their first interesting side effect! By wittering about Castles , I inspired forum member gilead to call for volunteers to forge a Castles inspired game! Currently it's in the brainstorming process - everything is up for debate - but a working title 'Fortress' has been agreed and a sourceforge project is undergoing the registration process. Anyway, join in the discussion if you are interested in contributing anything, be it ideas, graphics, code or kittens. Currently we are looking at writing it in Java (gilead's strongest language and one I'm comfortable with) combined with intergrating Vexi for the UI (Vexi is a rich user interface platform for web apps but could easily be applied to other contexts). Watch this space! (Or join in!) One of the Wormux devs is putting out some amusing spam. I've seen it in a few places, including the FG forums. Basically they are using a witty parod...

There's an interview with Ryan Gordon - more well known as icculus - over at Linux Games . I spotted the link over on Linux Gaming World . Whilst he is more associated with commercial "open source" titles [quoted because they usually are not free games, more free engines] it still makes for an interesting read although I'm not too sure I agree with all his assessments on how relevant (or irrelevant) some technologies are to the future of Linux gaming. Continuing on my spate of reporting on the progress of FreeTrain SE (well, I did campaign for nearly a year to get it ported to English) there's now a tools package up for download to assist in the creation of plugins - almost all the game's features are implemented as plugins. I heard from a rather good source that the next release of Privateer Gemini Gold is pretty close. They may do one more beta before the final release. Still, with better graphics, refined gameplay, and lots of play testing, this ve...

The author of SoulFu now provides the source with the installer. Download the latest version (Windows only) and install it and there is the source code contained in the installation. That gives me hope of a future version of the game for Linux. :-) The license is a little funny though - it is not a standard open source license and basically forbids a few things that you should read about if you are interested in modifying the source. There's an interesting article on "What makes a good Civ game" (pages 1 2 3 4 ). Most of it is just common sense but it would be interesting to analyse what parts of it are applicable to FreeCiv . The article is nothing new (circa 2003) but I enjoyed reading it anyway. I've been searching for more information on a 3D version of Exult . It exists, but in terms of the source and/or a relevant project page (with something more than a description ). The only decent information I can find is in a 2 year old locked forum thread , whi...

I feel my Free Gamer mojo returning. Awesome! :-) These days some Free games are really, really impressive. For any disbelievers were have youtube to help showcase some of the best the Free Software gaming community has to offer. TA:Spring is increasingly impressive these days. Some of the scenes in this video are amazing. And another . There's a large number of TA:Spring mods these days too, which I've been meaning to do a post about when I have the time to finish researching (or even play) them. Or how about this video which was made using the The Babylon Project - a total conversion of Freespace 2 set in the Babylon 5 universe. That looks like it could have been taken straight out the series. UFO:AI is snowballing - picking up more artists and contributors. Some of the contributed work is incredibly high quality. This game is going to really challenge the commercial competition in the coming years to actually innovate a little. The translation efforts on the Fr...

Just when I feared I was losing my blogging Mojo, a few tips from readers has put me back on the path to righteousness. First tip - Warsow 0.3 is now ready! The team behind this acrobatic FPS deathmatch game had a few problems getting it out of the door with some difficult-to-nail crashes but those problems have been addressed. There's new maps and models, a new gametype, gameplay tweaks, it would seem there's plenty for both new and current players. One of the issues veteran players have identified with Warsow is that it's a bit of an experts game. You have to be quite skillful to pull off some of the maneuvers. There was a detailed article on this matter but I can't seem to track it down right now. Also StarShip Troopers: Last Defense saw it's first beta release. It's Windows only, but since Glest is cross-platform I am optimistic this is a short term thing. Anyway, back to musing over the awards setup for moi...

Oh dear... lack of sleep, sobriety, and no Internet at a foreign location stole away my plans for Free Gamer blogging over the weekend. Anyway, normal service is now being resumed. :-) The Outer Space client got an update. I always knew about this free-to-play online space strategy game but only recently found out that [at least] the client is open source. There's a new FOSS game development blog going - Libery Gaming . The author seems to be focusing more on programming and development content. Not much else to talk about today, however I'm going to address the awards tonight.

I sit here with a smile on my face, not because I'm really really good looking [although I am] and not because I have to leave for a 5 day trip in 30 minutes and have yet to pack [although I do] but because I reckon this is the most amusing bug I've heard in a while: "Naked, female, and hating it in Second Life." Runesword II Speaking of role playing games, I remember back in the old days when my brother and I used to create our own RPGs using a few models and pen and paper. Well, there's an open source modern equivalent - Runesword II is designed to help people create their own role playing games. It looks pretty, is mature, and was recently open sourced, but I have kinda grown out of writing my own RPGs so I probably won't ever try it. But you could. :-) The latest version of Snowballz was causing would-be players a few headaches. The author has fixed most of the issues and re-uploaded version 0.9 - tsk tsk, naughty. New release should mean new versio...

The other day I came across Battleship 88 . Assuming it was freeware, being Windows only, I didn't mention it but did download it. Given the lack of a source code download on the website, I was a bit surprised at being forced to agree to the GPL before installing it. Despite what the word Battleship imbues - some form of strategy - the game is much more arcade in it's nature. You steer your battleship around blowing the <expletive> out of anything that gets near you. The game is complete - the graphics and sound are polished and it even contains an introduction to the gameplay (which is topical). Anyway, those who followed the link might have noticed it's to an organisation called www.gamecreation.org and they have completed a few games . I wonder if they all are available under the GPL and, if so, where the sources are? One game they list, which I've been looking for since forgetting it's name, is Shotgun Debugger . It's a top down shoot 'em ...

I was tempted, out of laziness, to say I had nothing to talk about... but that's just not true. :-D Daimonin The guys over at the Daimonin project have been making noises with another pre-release. Daimonin is an open source isometric 2D MMORPG. I got quite addicted to it at one point before my addiction to this blog kicked in, it can be quite an absorbing little game despite the lack of amazing 3D superficial sexy graphics. I'm not sure that the next version brings any graphical improvements but it's obvious they have been working hard on tweaking the gameplay . Meanwhile the Battle for Antargis lead developer has been investigating probably one of the bigger challenges to face open source game developers - artificial intelligence . (Cue joke about lack of intelligence of the decision to create open source games.) It is very hard to create an AI that is not simple, let alone ultimately predictable. I remember so many games of yester-year that ended up being played ...

It is commonly known that one of the major problems with volunteer game projects is lack of man power, which usually means that a few aspects that you come to expect in commercial titles tend to be neglected in Free games. One such aspect is tutorials . Many Free games are clones inspired by older commercial games, and as such assume familiararity with those games. This makes them incredibly difficult for a new player to get into without having to ask lots of seemingly obvious questions and that turns people off. Examples... I saw FreeLords 0.3.8 had a Windows binary so I thought I'd check it out. I know, I know, there's a manual [which incidently took about 7 clicks to get to from the frontpage - scandalous web design!] but reading that isn't fun. Playing is fun. Tutorials are teaching-whilst-playing. No tutorial, unsure of what to do, my interest quickly waned and I was back surfing brain sewage the Internet. Another example - FreeCol . Just what the hell are h...

Blob Wars: Blob and Conquer 0.90 is out! A 3D follow up to the 2D platformer Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid , Blob and Conquer looks like it is shaping up nicely from the gameplay videos on the website. It makes me happy to see Snowballz 0.9 released. This RTS now has an OpenGL backend so should run a bit better on faster systems. What I like about Snowballz is it's not just another RTS clone, with the generic C&C style gameplay traits. It has lots of character and original gameplay ideas and I can't wait to play it. I would now but I just finished watching De La Hoya lose to Mayweather and it's 5am or something silly. FreeTrain will see another release soon as work continues at a frantic pace. The translation to English has gotten quite a bit of interest in the game and there are now 3 developers working on it with hopefully more joining in over the next few weeks, there should be regular improvements and subsequent updates. With that in mind, it is time for Fre...

Well I guess the big scoop is that the Van Buren aka Fallout 3 tech demo has been released to the public domain so is now Free Software . I wonder if the community will pick it up and make it work properly - apparently it is quite far away from being a playable game but my laptop is low on disk space so I can't find out right now. I'll leave blurb to other sites . Remember I mentioned a Gunbound clone effort that started in the Ubuntu Forums? Well, it is now called i-team, has a set of characters - how cool do they look!!? - and the guy has finished coding pixel perfect collision detection. It is moving ahead nicely and perhaps we'll see a game sooner rather than later emerging from this effort. :-) I lamented yesterday that the game Bloboats wasn't available for download for Ubuntu . Well, d'oh, that's because it is in the Ubuntu repos but to be fair it did not say that on the Bloboats downloads page . Well I got an email from the author (thanks :-) and...

Hero of Allacrost There's some new screenshots over at the Hero of Allacrost project. It is looking really nice these days and they have come a long way. They are looking for people to help test out their next release so head on over to their forums if you are interested. :-) Speaking of forums, have you registered for the Free Gamer Forum yet? Why not? ;-) Bloboats - a side-scrolling race against the clock whilst dodging obstacles by using the way the boat interacts with the water. Think X-Moto meets the sea. It is cross platform but only Windows binaries are officially provided :-( so you either have to compile from source or try the unofficial Mandriva 2007 rpms or hope the guys at getdeb get on it. (I'm an Ubuntu user, can't you tell!?) Free Allegiance is the open source community effort spawned from Microsoft releasing the source code to their [now abandoned] game Allegiance . (See, MS are not all evil, just mostly.) Damn, I forgot to mention this a wh...

I absolutely have to start with FreeTrain . The first release of the translated game is now available. It is currently Windows only (tied to DirectX) and needs .NET but the medium term goal is to port FreeTrain to SDL and Mono so it can become cross platform. The download has been available for a few days but some documentation was needed so I held off mentioning it until now. Some tutorials have been put up so it is now possible to play the game without some seriously lucky guess work. Hedgewars ( screenshots ), like Worms / Wormux but with Hedgehogs! The number of Worms clones seems to be on the up. Perhaps it's going to need it's own award category - "Best Worms Clone!" ;-) I can't remember whether I mentioned it before, but Those Funny Funguloids (TFF) is now available for Linux . Also, Ubuntu packages have been created for I Have No Tomatoes which is written by the same guys as TFF. That was some major linkage for one paragraph. ;-) TFF is a ...

As you probably don't know, May 25th is the 1st birthday of Free Gamer. :-D To signify this momentus occasion, and because I've always wanted to do this, I'm going to run the first official Free Gamer awards! The purpose of the awards is to not only recognise the best the open source game scene has to offer, but also inspire those striving to bring us new and original free games, so I'm looking for ideas and feedback on how to organise the award categories. I especially don't want a predictable set of categories (Wesnoth and Frozen Bubble shouldn't win everything they go in for) and I definitely want to acknowledge upcoming games as much as the popular ones. I'm thinking that the categories could be based more on game aspect rather than genres i.e. most original, best storyline, best artwork, etc. I also don't want too many awards so they stay fairly meaningful - but not too few so they are not predictable and recognise more than a couple of games. ...

Scourge 0.18 ( download ) has been released. :-) If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult . Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there. Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online. It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find t...