New Look

You may or may not have noticed - depending on whether you have had your morning coffee or not - that Free Gamer has a new look! Thanks go to Iwan 'qudobup' Gabovitch for a sterling contribution. It gives the site it's own identity and he has come up with a cool fg logo and smart little icons. Anyway I love it, so thanks Iwan. In the spirit of open source he has made his work available as public domain.



Only a short one today as I'm short on time and energy after sorting this out...



Java CRPG

Dungeon Craft


There's a new release of JCRPG. Whilst it's still a long way from being a game, it is looking very nice and a few people have started to contribute models. If development pace keeps up of this 3D classic RPG framework I think we can expect some interesting games to the not-too-distant future coming from this project.



Whilst reading the comments on the JCRPG blog, somebody brought up another Dungeon Master inspired game...



Dungeon Craft:



is an effort to develop an RPG and editor that mimics SSI's Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA). This project began back in 1995 as an effort to learn more about Windows/DirectX programming.


It's Windows only :-( but has been in development for over 12 years and is still active! (That's impressive on it's own!) It looks quite nice. I wonder if there is any future scope to move it towards cross-platform technology like OpenGL?



Also the new FG forums [next in line for a makeover] have somewhat recovered since that rather annoying freeforums.org crash & data loss. Back to half the number of users and 25% of posts in just under a week which is quite good considering the [currently relatively small] size of the community. Do encourage your open source gaming contemporaries to join in - it would be good to have a central place for open source game [development] discussion outside the noise of larger sites that this guy describes, I think accurately, as ironically lonely places. Certainly there are many Free Software game projects that are very difficult to find - just like Dungeon Craft - because of the noise that accompanies a site the size of Sourceforge.



Anyway, back to normal tomorrow... hope you like the new look as much as I do!

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