Gaming Daily A-Z

Lee Vermeulen's brainchild Nexuiz is a fast-paced first-person shooter, better comparable to Unreal Tournament than to Quake, though based on latter's engine. Release 2.4 has been available for some hours now. Time to grab a copy and freaking play it. But first, let me bore you some. (Not recommended, skip following paragraphs, you could be fragging already! Time is money! Go shoot stuff !) Nexuiz is not just a remake of a UT or Q shooter, it contains many advanced and even some innovative features! Rockets can be destroyed by Bullets and if the timing is right, they will explode right into their shooter's face. The laser gun is the main method of movement, allowing alternative "rocket"-jumps without too much pain. Also you have the ability to make your rockets explode mid-air, which on one hand means that you don't have to aim for the ground and on the other hand allows you a combination of laser- and rocket-jumps - provided you have enough health and armor....

Tired today. Sorry for lack of details. Daimonin (2D MMORPG) got a new website. Spiffy. Warsow 0.42 . It's a fast multiplayer FPS. Ace video on Nexuiz , looks fancy FPS. There's an RC out for VDrift release 2008-02-23, the "next gen" car game. (I don't quite get the notion of an RC for dated releases. Vega Strike needs nvidia users to test before release due to an unknown number of cards affected by a buggy driver (boo for closed source). I'm... Zzzzzz...

SuperTuxKart 0.4rc1 has been released. It replaces the physics engine with bullet for collisions, and subsequently is far more fun to play. Some track improvements, a new character, better AI, music, and other features. I'll be honest, I thought 0.3 was unplayable because of the terrible collisions. I had a quick go of 0.4rc1 and it's much more fun. I still think the tracks are generally lacking but the game being more fun should encourage more contributors so hopefully we'll see some good tracks contributed this year. If you love MarioKart or just love SuperTuxKart, and have some good ideas for tracks, sketch them down and contact the STK team who are very receptive. Also they are looking for original gameplay ideas to give STK it's own identity, so contribute those too if you have any. FreeTrain Bloodmasters There's been a major development with the FreeTrain project . For those who don't remember, I ran a campaign asking for help translating FreeTrai...

Lots of activity amongst the FreeGameDev crowd. Qubodup has created an amazing new forum skin , so participating in the forums has never been a more pleasant experience than it is now, and he's still tweaking away. A new feature, Wikiwatch , a sort of planet for wikis, was added. Now I just need to improve the blog (include announcements rss, update links, generally nicer layout) and FreeGameDev is go. 5.... 4.... 3... etc. ;-) In terms of game news, it's gone a bit quiet, fortunately for me. Glest with shadows Bloodmasters Glest got shadows. Purty. :-) The OpenClou! team have put up their first model concepts, as seen on the Sourceforge project . Lovely! Bloodmasters will soon be open source. It's a 3D top-down arcade shooter with plenty of blood. Will report on it more when it is. Yay for me . :-D I wanted to put a screenshot up but Blogger is being lame... will put it up later. Edit: Done! Bridge Builder 2006 is now available for Linux from here . It'...

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick. Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release. FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development. NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!" Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their o...

Zero Projekt FIFE is starting to come of age. Although their tech-demo collaboration ended after a dispute between the two parties, Zero Project have continued their efforts and have settled on FIFE for their game project which has so far been two years in the making. To celebrate their second birthday they've put up an array of WIP screenshots . FIFE got a nice new layout for it's wiki too. The Castle 0.8.1 has been released. "The Castle is a first-person shooter game in a dark fantasy setting. Your main weapon is a sword, so the fight is mostly short-range. Three main levels are included, packed with creatures, items, and sounds. The game engine is based on VRML, OpenGL, OpenAL, and all shadows are done by the shadow volumes approach." Interesting but not quite there yet. Remember the classic game Theme Park (it started off the whole dang 'Theme X' genre)? Followed by the Rollercoaster Tycoon series (1-3)? Well these guys do and they are aiming t...

Glest: Alien Invasion Gearhead2 Chromium BSU Hot on the heels of Glest 3.0 is... Glest 3.1 ! Great to see the rejuvenated development of a poster Free Software game. This version continues to add multiplayer features such as in-game chat. Oh, and a new menu background. Eye candy! :-) The mod scene for Glest has also never been healthier. The latest mod to show up (although currently just a WIP) is Glest: Alien Invasion . Pictures speak etc - see the images. In the grand scheme of things, websites aren't that important. Or are they? Gearhead2 is a mech-based rogue-like. Maybe you like the sound of a [mech-based] rogue-like. To everybody else, the term 'rogue-like' tends to mean 'no graphics', so when you visit a web page like the homepage of Gearhead2 , combined with the knowledge of it being a rogue-like, I bet the vast majority of people go no further. It looks awful, the screenshots link doesn't work, and because in the lay visitor's mind the ...

Warzone 2100 2.1-beta1 is out, with plenty of new features ( changelog ). Internationalized, improved/additional AI, 64-bit support, in-game video options, and multi-turret support are the picks of the bunch. "Additionally there are many parts of the game that have been completely or partially rewritten. So old bugs may have been made completely irrelevant and new ones most certainly have been introduced. So new bug reports are most certainly very welcome, even [for] bugs that where present in 2.0.x already. Any suggestions are welcome as well of course." You'll have to compile the beta yourself. Here's a slightly out of date youtube showing what the fuss is about: LordsAWar Freelords LordsAWar 0.0.8 is also available to download. The LordsAWar homepage is a bit spartan. It's a continuation of the C++ version of FreeLords , which has since been rewritten in Java and recently released 0.0.2 of the Java version. The games are not going their different ways g...

Laser Tactics is the new name for Nuclear Graveyard. It's a turn based 3D squad tactics game, originally a remake of Laser Squad in 3D that has since transcended the initial goal of being a remake. The author is fairly frustrated at the lack of interest in the game because it doesn't fit the standard mold. If you want to try something a bit tactical and a bit different to the usual FPS or strategy style of game. There were quite a few links in the last post with little description of them. OpenFracas Pathman Asteroid Wars OpenFracas is like an advanced version of Risk. What it actually is , is a rebirth of the game Fracas which was open sourced but is writtin in VB6, which is frankly a bit of a rubbish language for anything other than win32 forms. There's a new development release of Oolite ( announcement + Mac , Linux , Windows ), the 3D space flight adventure game. I'd seen in many places concern that Oolite development was dead, so this is a delightful re...

Well... I have a big list of stuff to write about, so, I'll cheat. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V Game updates OpenFracas ( http://www.openfracas.org/ ) from Ubuntu forums ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=692342 ) Oolite 1.70 development version ( http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4060 ) with enhanced scripting OpenTTD OpenGFX project ( http://wiki.openttd.org/index.php/Graphics_Replacement ) Daimonin tileEngine v2 ( http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=38992 ) Pathman, 3D pacman ( http://pathman.sf.net/ ) AsteroidWars ( http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=27326 ) Official ETCE homepage ( http://etce.usef-et.org/ ) Sector91 ( http://www.sector91.com/ ) from Wesnoth forums ( http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19845 ) Flightgear 1.0 vid ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKg0Gpm00o ) Platinum Arts Sandbox Beta 2.0 ( http://www.kids.platinumarts.net/ ) is a Sauer mod for kids, including karts ( http://www.cubeengine.com/forum.php4?action=display_thread...

Ok, this is the sh*t . Not only that, word has it, this is going to be open source. Of course, this is what some guy who reads some forum has emailed me, and I'm being completely sensational by posting it on an open source blog, but the youtubes are so cool that I can't help myself. Update: as confirmed in a comment by nullsquared [the author], he is currently undecided over whether to go with a freeware or open source license. MasterNave emails, "Just got a tip from a coder friend of mine, about portalized, an open source portal engine, based on ogre3d . Apparently, 0.5 will be public." So, the scene is set. Ready to blow your mind? Ooo er that's kind of mad. Update: the next video deserves a bit of explanation - it demonstrates scalable portals where the world is a different size through the portal. That is, if you go through the portal the world gets bigger/smaller, or if you pass an object through the portal that object gets bigger/smaller. Very neat. ...

Goonies F1 Spirit Road Fighter Daimonin A good open source platform game that never gets a mention is The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition . This game is a remake of the classic NES / Master System version by Konami. The same team is also responsible two rather fun arcade top-down racing games, F1 Spirit and Road Fighter , which are also remakes. I'm not sure what the source license is for these (ack, there goes my Free Software credibility) but you can get the source and the games compile / run on the 3 major platforms (y'know, Lin/Win/Mac). There's not-so-recent updates to Daimonin , the 2D isometric fantasy MMORPG that seems to play second fiddle to the likes of Eternal Lands and Planeshift due to it not coming with the fancy 3D 3Dness. I mean, everybody wants 3D, and those who don't play nethack. So there's no room for anything else. Especially not something as addictive as Daimonin. I'm not going near that game again, I barely escaped the first t...

FIFE , the Fallout-like engine project, have made their first release of 2008, and put up a video of the tech demo that comes with the engine. Lots of new features, lots of progress, hopefully we'll see some exciting FIFE powered games coming along this year! D2X-XL is an spanky implementation of the engine for Descent 1/2, both very popular commercial games in their time. It adds lots of improvements, but the games themselves are proprietary and look a bit dated. So the D2X-XL guys are looking for people to contribute to a free D2X-XL media project . It's a good opportunity to create an awesome free game because the ships and designs from the Descent genre of games doesn't tend to be very complex, meaning it is easy to tackle on or two models without having to animate and skeletalize and add moles and skin pores and all the other daftness that seems to accompany character modelling lately. Back on topic, and they have some ships and textures and a few levels already,...