Gaming Daily A-Z

UFO:AI There's beta installers for Linux and Windows for the popular open source game UFO:AI . The changelog for version 2.2 is impressive. The download link is a bit hard to get to - a ploy to stop too many players mistakenly downloading the beta when they didn't realise it might have bugs. Anyway, grab it here , and help them make UFO:AI 2.2 a great release. :-) There was an interesting comment on the observation I made regarding the version number of LordsAWar : 0.0.3 for the lordsawar version doesn't mean 3% done. The game has most aspects of Warlords 2 implemented, where as freelords only has a few. Well why version 0.0.3 then? Ok, I admit, version numbers are probably one of the least important aspects of game design. But, come on, really, if your game has lots of features and close to what you consider "1.0" for your game, then label is as such. People who are casually looking for a game to play will see 0.0.3 and think, "not even alpha." T...

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful. Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-) Blood Frontier Blood Frontier , a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine , has seen it's first alpha release become available for download . As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change. I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community...

Extreme Tux Racer The team over at Extreme Tux Racer - the latest fork to take on the Tux Racer continuation mantle - have made their inaugral release. It's still a bedding-in period with no real major updates other than a new campaign (cup?) but hopefully it will signal the start of a new lease of life for development of a popular open source franchise. FreeLords , the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed. LordsAWar , a fork of discontinued FreeLords C++ codebase, has hit version 0.0.3. Whilst that sounds very small I think it's not really a reflection on the comp...

FreeCol A game update of interest (not been many lately) - FreeCol 0.7.2 . Not too much else of interest going on. A few months ago I would have spent some time digging up unusual games or extra development information. Or write some interview questions or something. My time however is very limited at the moment. I have a few Free game commitments and I really want to focus on creating Fortress. It's been a long time coming but I'm now at a stage where I want to contribute to a game as well as making copious amounts of net noise. As such perhaps it is time to make this a more public blog - have some people contribute to it. Make it more community-based. I'm thinking about it... The other thing I need to do is organise things a little for the www.freegamedev.net (forums current here ) community. A few simple tasks and things would be able to run without me but I've been too busy to sort that stuff out. Anybody got some free spare time? I couldn't find any low...

Nope, I'm not dead, just caught up in doing real work so time has been at a premium lately. Eat the Whistle Also not dead is arcade football game Eat the Whistle . They have migrated to SVN as they build up to a new release. 'They' could mean just 'he' or just 'her' as I'm not quite sure how many people are working on EtW but the good news is it is being worked on. It's a fun game to play but suffered from being very buggy so hopefully this release will bring it a new lease of stable life. What has been dead has been my Freshmeat inbox - no notable game releases for a while apart from Widelands , Bub Brothers , ja2-stracciatella , Wormux , and Xarvh. And those are just the ones on the Game Tome. Still, like I say, Freshmeat has been quiet. ;-) Xarvh is not linked because it has been renamed to Everborn . It's a turn-based multiplayer fantasy strategy game, with real-time battles, born as a clone of Simtex's Master of Magic. In case yo...

I'm really quite strapped for time right now so again this is brief. Stargus , the Stratagus-based project to get native Starcraft on Linux, is close to release . If the screenshots are anything to go by then Stargus will be pretty playable with this release. The latest Freedroid RPG release looks nice. The project seemed to have stalled earlier in the year but there's lots of contributors these days which is nice to see. Want to make games but not a programmer? Maybe Mokoi Gaming is for you. The project is in it's infancy but it's already usable although the documentation is a little sparse. Still, it all seems well done so a bit of user feedback I'm sure will be warmly received. Tennix now has SVG graphics. A very concise concept is turning into a nice little game to while away the occasional onset of boredom. Also another simple game shaping up nicely is Qonk , with 5-minute galactic conquest gameplay. No screenshots. No time to find any. :-( Edit: a...

The forums are NOT down, they are still up here: http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/ I'm moving admin of the freegamedev.net domain over to tuxfamily.org so it can be more useful than a simple redirect. [watch this space!] On top of that, if your Free Software game project includes non-Free art then you need to be careful. Why? Because this could happen to you. Sure it's a setback that the Warsow team will recover from, but by using an appopriate license or agreeing terms this situation could be avoided. For instance I'm accepting some non-Free contributions to a project of mine but I made sure the author agreed the graphics had irrevocable usage rights for the project. So he can't rip his graphics out if he has a change of heart. Anyway, the whole purpose of creating games is to play them, right? Well, Nuxified and Cluesoft have come together to put together a tournament using solely Free Software games. They haven't yet chosen the exact games for the to...

Hrm... *eyes shift left then right* ...something's wrong - I don't know what to write about. I could start with that ATI/AMD releasing ATI GPU specs and committing to helping out the open source drivers, but everybody else is doing that and to be honest - whilst game related and good news for ATI (who were close to being written off as a half-decent provider of hardware for anybody intending to run Linux which is actually quite a lot of people) it's not overly relevant to open source games which tend to be, wel, not so demanding on our GPUs. Oh, if you read that first here, either you are a really dedicated Free Gamer reader and checked FG first thing after sleeping for 16 hours having slept so long because you spent the entire day ready the FG archives, or you have your head in the sand when it comes to technical news... ;-) I tried out Interstate Outlaws , the Carmageddon-ish game that is the successor to [the now defunct project] Automanic . It comes with an auto-upda...

I really shouldn't be posting right now because I have a million more important things to do but I love you guys so... There's a preview version of Vega Strike 0.5.0 up for download for Intel Mac users . The VS devs need some feedback on most notably sound due to porting issues. Users of other platforms will have to use subversion for the time being but Windows users don't need to compile as there's a .exe in subversion. Want to know what OpenTTD will look like when the new graphics are ready? Well there's some interesting screenshots in the Ubuntu forums . I know this guy has riled the OpenTTD community by posting work there that they don't approve of. Issues to do with language barriers and badly put-together mockups / inserted graphics. Still, it seemed a bit harsh to me but for some reason he doesn't understand English. Anyway, this babble is digressing too much. Globulation2 and Bos Wars got updates. Hopefully C&C being released as freewa...

Whenever I have an extended FG absence (nearly 4 days this time!) it always makes me feel like shouting "I'm back" in the style of that guy from Independence Day. Maybe in a past life I had my dignity taken away from me by rectally-fascinated aliens? Who knows, but now it's out of my system I doubt I'll think it again. So... since it's "tomorrow" now, I'll point people in the direction of a comment by FIFE developer mvbaracuda who corrects my "commercial quality techdemo" description of the upcoming joint venture between FIFE and Zero Projekt. So if you are interested in making adventure games then investigate further. Paintown Paintown is an old school beat-em-up like Double Dragon. It's been in development all year and has an installer for Windows and source download for other platforms (Linux only, I think, but not checked it thoroughly) and looks like a fun game. I tried out Vega Strike which looks nice although I think t...