Gaming Daily A-Z

After over 3 years of development since the last stable release, many major new features and contributions, and lots of patience, Vega Strike 0.5.0 has finally been released . There's so much potential in this release. Shader support, movie support, so many active contributors, and a more settled development timeline that should see more regular releases from now onwards. Despite the length of time since the previous release (0.4.3) the project rarely was not in active development. That means that 0.5.0 is a huge update and Vega Strike is poised to return to the high esteem in which it was once held as a FOSS project. For screenshots check out the gallery but none were recent enough for me to include them here. Vega Strike is a really cool project and this stable release will hopefully further galvanise the development. If things continue, I have no doubts VS will turn out to be a truly stunning FOSS game. It's pretty damn good already!

Adonthell's broccoli bushes. James Nash has kept working on vegetation sprites for Adonthell 's art repository (which is quite meager right now.) He is using layers for producing the images. What you don't see is the fact that in the original image I have the outlines and surfaces separated as individual layers so I can easily re-colour them to make variations. Equally I can hide some layers such as the leaves. This way it is much easier to manipulate the images and to create a richer variety of objects. Layered images can be seen as "source" files for flat/"compiled" bitmaps. Great to know that people actually use this editing-friendly layered-images technique for producing game art. Good news for Linux-users! Automatically built binaries of FreeOrion's latest SVN revision are available from psitronic.de/div/FO . They will allow you to play the game without having to build it, which isn't that easy on some distributions. Best thanks to krodd...

SilverTree, buggy and ugly but stable and promising! SilverTree RPG dead? It's forum full of porn (nsfw) spam (nsfw)? Today I got a letter from Anok (name not changed), asking about the whereabouts of SilverTree's devs and whether the project did evaporate or not, and I say "Stand back lady, I'll handle this!" ;) Well, I have to say that the inconsistency between the google code project , the forum , the web page and the Gna! project is a bit confusing, but SilverTree seems to be pretty stable and working. There are lots of sensible-gameplay-impossible-making bugs , but as I said, the game is stable and the major problem seems not to be the code, but rather the media. It definitely needs more 3D models and prettier textures and sounds and music. Very nice about SilverTree is how easy it is to compile it. Here's a little introduction set for ya'll: Getting the source? Easy as pie! svn checkout http://silvertree.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ silvertree ...

Radakan 's devs have decided to use the jME aka jMonkeyEngine , just like JCRPG does! Neat! I admit that I was expecting the project to evaporate, it just had too pretty a website and some team member was very concerned with picking the right wiki and installing a flash audio player on the site, while there was nothing of the game in sight. (I also was afraid the team would come up with some idea like " Hey, let's make our own 3D engine! Right? ") I'm glad I seem to be wrong, the first tech demo video has been uploaded. (I'm not sure if that's not just some engine-bundled terrain and model, but even if it is, what the hell! They're grappling with it! Enough proof of interest and engagement for me!) I just hope they won't let the plans for game story get in the development's way. But I might be wrong worrying about that - Radakan is a "single-player sandbox 3D RPG". Sounds like something that is free of the bug feature "storyl...

New art for Adonthell There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash , an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".) Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions , the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo . Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games si...

Bad timing, I know, but better now than waiting until next Christmas! It's a cute snake-like game, RUDI . Source code under GPL, media probably under some non-commercial license. It runs in wine-0.9.58-473-g1eba09b (but without sound for me). Perhaps it can even be compiled for Linux. One strange thing about the game is the Readme file: [...] The compiled version of RUDI v0.1 is freeware, but the source of RUDI v0.1 is GPL licensed. You are not allowed to use any elements of the software (neither the compiled nor the source version) for any commercial purposes including contest submissions. [...] I suppose by "Elements" the developer means "media" because it is of course not legal to prohibit commercial use of GPL-software. I'll try to find out. Enjoy the annoyingly movie-trailer-like video!

Hi, I'm qubodup; not the regular guy. As you see, I can post here too. We had a discussion about making Free Gamer a collaborative blog a long time ago, so maybe some of you feel like writing big-time? Especially now that Charlie is more busy with life? :) Another while ago, a related idea came up: Creating a non-English subforum. Here it is and if we're lucky, it might be(come) useful some day! Among other things, I spent a heap of time on trying to un-messify our free engines list - the result so far is the Work In Progress 3D engines list , please comment which features you think are important for the categorization of real-time 3D graphics libraries (aka. engines ^^) After all, one could say, I create these wiki pages for you . So go ahead and give me instructions. I visited many IRC channels for getting information about the engines and I learned a bit about them too. For example the PySoy project, (which was formerly based on Soya 3D but was rewritten four times sinc...