Gaming Daily A-Z

Release 4.1 of Brain Workshop introduces some GUI tweaks and a new sound theme (piano notes instead of spoken letters). I finally gave it a try and was able to record sound via recordmydesktop with the help of this config guide . The rules of the game are: watch and listen and press one button if the same field becomes active as it was n (a number) rounds before or if the same sound appears as it was n rounds before. I'll definitely 'play' this brain-trainer some more. :) Brain Workshop 4.1 Are you into web-based strategy games? Epoch is an sci-fi/space type one. Development started in 2002 and it is open source. According to this forum post , Epoch's team is now working on an OGRE -based 3D game with the same setting, but it might take some years. You might have heard about the "open source", GNU/Linux-based, 250$ EVO Smart Console . Lol. 100% vaporware .

Unnamed Game This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid". Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum . Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?...

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing! Eisenstern Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or...

There's a few juicy updates to several great Free Software game projects over the last few days. I'm feeling too lazy to grab screenshots though. You'll just have to peruse yourself if you find something interesting. We'll start with TA:Spring 0.77b3 - Linux and Windows binaries are up for download - with the comment, "After some people have stated that we should release more early and often*, we give you 0.77b3 here." I downloaded and installed it using the generic Linux installer - worked without a hitch - and it looks fan-bloody-tastic. Still, the state of licensing of some of the content is a little unclear - I don't feel reassured that I'm playing a totally Free game although I'm certain some of the mods are Free Software. That doesn't bother me like it might some of the purists out there. OpenLieroX 0.57_beta8 arrived. Worms and blood and chaotic 2D action. It's a pixel dream. Open City 0.0.6 beta can be found on Sourcefor...

Quake2World skeleton pointing grenade launcher at you Recently, I became friends with an open source first-person shooter: Quake2World (q2w). As the name indicates, it uses an idTech2-based engine and currently aims to have Quake 2's mechanics. Although development seems to be centered around graphical features at the moment, the game is sexy and fun. There are no bots so far and only a minimal selection of servers, so you'll have to ask for some company on #quetoo @freenode, which is the community's home. The project is looking for code and content contributors. The current policy is to allow content licensed under GPL /CC-licenses/ Zlib /MIT/ WTFPL (although I believe that some of the included content is not compatible with any of these). Quake2World Promo Video

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42 USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems . I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time. The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons: Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems) microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it Here's the link to the pd -licensed diagram source. In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible. Well...

Toying with Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2's Editor(HD) Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2 has been released and now needs a new home ! It is house-trained and can be picked up 24/7 from it's SourceForge shelter . One can now enter buildings (in a pleasant no-transition way) and an editor is now included. I gave the editor a try. My first thought was: "What a waste of energy! Why did they not incorporate Tiled , as for example Battle Tanks did?" But then I remembered that my last encounter with the general purpose Java editor. It showed me that instead of being able to completely rely on Tiled, a team would have to create an extra tool for tasks that go beyond map editing. At least a team of non-Java programmers (Allacrost is in C++ and Lua). Allacrost's editor will go beyond tiles. When it's finished, it will also be a character, skills and inventory editor and will support integration of music/sounds. Greg Cannon blocking the view on STK ;) GamePwned is a freeware a...

Lavirinto 3D 0.6.0 Lavirinto 3D brings Zen wisdom, Pipes and Pac-Man together. It's a 3D version of the game Zenji [ video ]. The colorful levels and friendly music made me quite enjoy the stay and I even finished all campaigns. I noticed only one rudeness of the game: if you loose all your lives, you have to re-play all the levels of the campaign. :| The game is written in Java (using lwjgl ) and thus runs on every machine with a Java runtime environment installed. Just use the .sh or .bat script! The code is GPL and most of the media too. Some sounds were taken from Soundsnap, which is an non-free resource, and will be replaced soon. Four people were involved in the creation: One lead designer, developer and visual artist, one assistant texture artist, one assistant developer and one musician . I think the end product is handsome. Balazar 3, 2D version Balazar 3 was released. It's a room-based slash and hack game, with some nice graphics in both 2D and 3D mode. It also su...

OpenArena 0.8.0 recently got unreleased , because the project administrator decided that some included textures by TRaK were not legally GPL-licensed. Free as in freedom CG Textures? No. :( So why do the CG Textures -based textures seem GPL-incompatible? Well, Marcel, CG Textures' administrator, wrote at least twice , that the textures on his website cannot be re-licensed under a free content license . Also the CG Textures license clearly states, that re-distribution of the textures and of derivate versions in texture form is prohibited. The right to re-distribute is one of the pillars, on which free software , open source and free works stand. But it is not simple dogmatism which makes me agree with these definitions. When I create a piece of media for use in games, then I want to give others the ability to change it as easily as possible, so it fits their need. Because of this, it is vital that I am allowed to provide the source (the most raw/least edited form of the media)...