Gaming Daily A-Z

Iris2 There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days: Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features ( announcement ) Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances ( announcement ) SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download ( announcement ) Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor ( news page ) Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something) Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info NewCol NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine ...

Well, I was fighting with myself not to post twice in a single day, but I have so much good stuff to post and the last post was simply a rant so it's OK! Topically, Extreme Tux Racer 0.4 has been released, bringing better graphics, a cleaner slicker ui, all new courses and more! You can find download information on the site. No new screenshots on the site yet though. I can't believe I've not seen this game mentioned anywhere else. (Who maintains the tome these days?! It doesn't even have an ETR entry!!!) ETCE XreaL ETCE (full name yet to be decided) is an already-underway project to create a successor to the popular (and proprietary) game Enemy Territory: Castle Wolfenstein. They have [wisely] chosen Sauerbraten as the base for the game. They have a forum , development screenshots , and buckets of enthusiasm. Could the gameplay of one of the most popular online FPS games of all time soon be found in a Free Software game? Let's hope so! Paintown is an a...

Don't bother reading this if you want anything informative. It's a rant. It's been a while since I had the lists on the blog, and they will return one day. Not least because I'm fed up of seeing list after list after list of ~7-20 open source games pop up in cheap attempts to get web traffic. Often the lists just comb over the same popular games that most people should know about already and are much listed all over the net, but they still get dugg or fsdaily'ed or whatever-the-latest-craze-site-is'ed. The standards are often too low on these sites (in general). I'm sure people just click '+' without really reading. What's worse is that these lists are usually poorly researched, such as this one (don't click unless you want proof - link ). Very little info is given on each game, just youtube vids of the games most people are likely to already know about. The author states all the games in the list are open source, then puts America'...

The early bird has to wait for the worm. And when he wanders off a bit bored, he gets back to find some other bird has poached the worm and his morning was fruitless. So, there you have it, you may as well lie in. There's an update to Battle for Antargis , version 0.2.1.5 which is labelled a "developer release". The build system has been overhauled so the game should be easier to build. There have been improvements to the game too and the next version should be the first Antargis release to feature a storyline. I really like this project, Godrin is creating an entirely original game that doesn't conform to any particular standard mold. Bos Wars pre2.5 is available for download. Improved graphics with beautiful particle explosions, new maps, and bug fixes. Sounds like this project is galvanising now that the developers don't have to focus on separate Stratagus releases. Nimuh 1.0 , "searching for the andalusian treasure". Interesting looking iso...

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him. FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely. Sauer NYC Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style. Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is....

Ok, ok, I know, I've been a bit rubbish lately. I'm struggling with the same problems that afflict many, many Free Software developers. Firstly I over-committed myself and the blog is lower priority than the various Free Software projects I should be working on. The blog is, if you like, the end result of far too much web surfing indulgence. If I can't indulge, the blog material quickly dries up. It's why nobody else does it; you can't do it if you don't do a lot of research and research takes a lot of time. Fortunately, over the last year a few other sites have come up. Libregamewiki, the FreeGameDev site (the forums , the awesome art search site and wiki ) have materialized and the Linux Game Tome has been somewhat resurgent now it has reliable hosting. I like to think that in some small way I somehow caused the new waves of Free Software gaming that's hitting the beaches lately. Butterfly on freegamer, tornado on alpha centurai or something li...

Quite a lot to cover, simply because there's a lot of small items that have backed up in my little "FG updates" list which I've been waiting to pool together. Firstly, the "big" news in that UFO:AI 2.2 got released. There's plenty to write home about , tons of new features, and it's an awesome game. I'm not a great fan of some of the micro-management although it's part of the original X-COM games so understandably part of UFO:AI - I would like to see some automation aids (auto-assign ammo etc) - but that aside this is a really, really good game. If it was released as a commercial game it'd be respected, and because it's Free Software it's only going to get better. Here's a video: So, the Apricot project is gaining pace. They have still to decide on what type of game they are making. I hope they make, out of their choices, a platform game. I must say, I really disagree with some of their assertions. If a platform gam...

Of course, when I say new, I mean new to me. New to me means, generally, a bit off the radar in the Free Software game community. So, with the post title qualified, let's start... Top10 is a realistic kart racing game for Windows and Linux. It reminds me of Karting Race , which is fairly inevitable since they are both kart racing simulations, but Top10 is GPL (yay!) whereas Karting Race is freeware (not-so-yay!) so it already has that going for it over Karting Race. (See, I believe that being open source is a significant strength for a freely-available game.) It's quite playable already although still undergoing heavy development. Less words, more video: Opposite Lock is a racing game for J2ME platforms, originally written for mobile phones. The author has released the engine under a GPL license with 3 free tracks, and is planning to release the game tools including a tile-based track editor, as open source too, and eventually his game tracks under a CC license. It ...

Remember me? SimCity, open source. The news is nearly a year old , but now it has been released and you can try to compile it. Download the source or get it via git: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/ projects/micropolis-activity . Unfortunately neither version wanted to be built on my machine. =( The name SimCity was removed from the game, along with the plane crash disaster. The new name is Micropolis . According to a text file in the release, child-friendly graphics are wanted for the OLPC version. Update: Micropolis has now it's own home page . There is a list of games for the XO, can you think of any, that would fit that list ? Spring surprise In other news, Spring 0.76b1 has been released. The Changelog reveals that for example installing mods is now easier. Hopefully it'll work for me, until this day I was only able to run the engine tech demos. Let's go get it then!

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year. I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too. Simutrans 128 Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com . And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can ...

Just a tiny snack this time! One of the Christmas presents this year was Battle Tanks Xmas Edition . It introduces more interactivity (very GTA-like stuff) and a lot of fixes. No kidding, this is the biggest update we've ever done to our little game. Sounds promising. Warzone 2100 2.0.10 Warzone 2100 2.0.10 was released shortly before 2008. It fixes ATI 3D graphics and Vorbis 1.2 sound support and should make the game fully playable for some who were not able to run it with sound or at reasonable frame rates. Also terrain rendering is supposed to be faster and produce prettier results. The ex-commercial project is for me the best free strategy game available. It was GPL-ed, excluding videos and music and I hope that it will soon feature some cool tracks to make the click-action even more pleasant. Stormbaan Coureur 2.0.2 is available for linux systems . It features a new model, which I think is sexy, although I don't understand how the rear axis is physically possible (you...

Hi there, I'm new here but let's get straight to the point. sfxr While browsing through the Ludum Dare contest's blog , I found a nifty little tool which generates 8-bitish sfx, without me having to know anything about sound synthesis. It's called sfxr and was made by Tomas Pettersson . License unknown. You can download it for win32 and *nix (run 'make') systems. The other awesome thing is the first FreeGameDev.net modelling contest . The mission is to create rts industrial-style buildings under free licenses. The competition ends when February begins. Ironically, I tripped over a similar contest in a forum, where I told about the FGD contest. Hex-a-hop Yesterday I realized, that Charlie never mentioned (oh snap he did, under the name Hex-a-pop ) the totally awesome puzzle game Hex-a-hop . It's homepage is dead, but the game survived at Debian . I also was able to retrieve a half-broken archive (linux source/build) using the Wayback machine . Try the g...