Gaming Daily A-Z

Ruby Early Monday. Pioneer rays of light touched my face like golden hair. It was then that the second Ruby weekend game programming competition came to an end. The results are not impressive, but much more than I had anticipated. The previous Rubyweekend took place only 1.5 months ago, and the weather motivates to spend time outside the reach of game-creation-suitable input devices. Also my humble opinion is that the topic "opposites" was way too liberal. Many games weren't finished, though are playable to some degree. Two of the submitted games had incorrect-case directories/filenames!!!! /me rages !!!!11!! Well, let's blame the weather, shall we? :D Me and kiba wanted to create a simple rts called Playground Wars and we failed. No problem, lesson learned (don't try to make an rts in little time.) No regrets but if I'm to participate in a game creation compo this summer again, I will work for it at night so I can sleep in the sun at daytime! I like Opposite...

TORCS 1.3.1 It has been a while since the last time I gave The Open Racing Car Simulator a try and this time I had unexpectedly much fun with it. Though some things are strange about it: the game generally runs smoothly, except for some rare, sporadic lags which make controls problematic for a second. There are great textures in the game but some of them are just bad (probably heritage from darker times.) I like the track's layouts but I wish there was an environment artist who would spice up TORCS' landscapes. Still, I think it's great. There is a lack of a damage model, but it's still fun to practice an aggressive driving style sometimes. :) Oh yeah, I nearly forgot to tell you that I made a stupid little gameplay video . I tried to compile the racing simulation from CVS and failed, but fortunately it is available in binary forms for Win/Lin/Mac and is easy to install . One unusual aspect of the game's installer is that you can to choose to not install the unfree...

Surt's goblin Surt contributed the first model to OpenDungeons (and it looks good!) The model also was quickly incorporated by Timong into jClassicRPG . Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb ) released the first version of Choria , which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest . Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux! RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :) The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ). lalalove at dusmania Part of the dusmania was a overnight games creation co...

Nebula from FreeOrion So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today? On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae . Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds! I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE . You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic! OpenDungeons' map editor OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger 's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome... So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS ! There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Co...

Frank and mushroom from Apricot There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine , focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping. Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be. The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space ba ck gr ou nds , which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actua...

WorldTool r3 for Radakan Today I finally gave WorldTool (release 3) a try, which is a map editor for Radakan . To use the tool, one has to download it, extract it and then run java -Djava.library.path=. -jar WorldTool.jar . The tool allows you to create a map and to raise and lower the terrain and paint textures on it via brushes. You can place objects on it, which will automatically be at the correct height relative to the ground. It is fun to play around with (though not for too long, as the art asset is tiny and I don't know how to import additional media and because all I can do is make a map, not walk with a character on it or place items or monsters. - Mind you, the editor is in an early stage.) While using it, I got the thought that if such tools were developed enough to be able to produce content to truly enrich games, their ease of use would attract many potential contributers and could turn a player into a contributor. Even if the advanced features (like creating charac...

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world. Blood Frontier , the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release. Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think). There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, thi...

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll , then download this .blend file , open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :) Apricot, first demo Edit: An unofficial OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release was posted . Testing it is encouraged, so that the official release can become a great one. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new maps and models. The GearHead 1/2 homepage has been updated a while ago. It now looks pretty pretty and has a sexy RSS feed . The GearHead games are Roguelike titles (which I find not that cool...