Gaming Daily A-Z

OpenTTD OpenGFX OpenTTD moved a step closer to being a Free Software game with alpha releases of OpenGFX , the "[8bpp] Graphics Replacement Project". There's still a few black boxes ("features") where yet-to-be-replaced buildings should be, but it looks fairly good other than that. OpenTTD 32bit extra zoom Of course, this is just the low-resolution replacement that makes OpenTTD fully free, and is not to be confused with the high-resolution graphics work (see screenshot). The more detailed graphics are [unsurprisingly] less further along. In the meantime, there is a totally Free Software transport game in Simutrans . Simutrans Pak96 Comic Pak96 Comic [for Simutrans] looks especially gorgeous. Clean, clear, and consistent graphics mean you can focus on gameplay rather than get distracted by artifacts or areas that are difficult to visually parse. The simplistic style has meant they have been able to rapidly create a large number of graphics with minimal de...

Meritous: lots of projectiles and no shields Through Libregamewiki , I found a game that was new for me: Meritous , a real-time dungeon crawler (like Goblin Hack ) with strong arcade tendencies. Meritous's map view In the game you walk through rooms and fight monsters. These enemies sometimes have multiple forms (and thus need to be killed more than once). You try to avoid the projectiles they shoot at you, while charging your psi circuit , to release a circle shock wave of destruction. Sometimes there are boss fights. When the enemies are slain, you collect the crystals that they dropped. These can be used to upgrade the speed with which your weapon charges, to decrease it's cool-down time or to strengthen your shield (yes, you have a self-recharging psi shield thingey). Other than the purchasable upgrades, there are free upgrades and permanent bonus-giving artifacts to be found in treasure chests after boss battles. The impression of the game on me is a very positive one. It ...

Warzone 2100's new look Development of new, experimental terrain renderer for Warzone 2100 has started . It blends textures depending on terrain and it looks freaking awesome . For comparison: an example of the old terrain. Four CGTextures-textures (at 1024x1024 pixels) were kindly permitted to be used under GPL terms. But more are needed. If you happen to have some mad texturing skillz up your sleeves: Warzone 2100 needs you! You can see the current tile sets, that need replacement, here .

Fall of Imiryn r792 Annchienta is an isometric RPG engine. It is being used by the console-style RPG Fall of Imiryn (FoI), created by the same developer. The terrain is kind of 3D while everything else is good old pixel-ish sprites. So how playable is the game? Well, it has NPCs and enemies, it has end bosses and maps and character levels and skills and spells. There is grinding and there are savepoints. Sounds complete? Oh right, story! It has story too. I don't know how much though, still have to find the right spot to catch some fish first... EDIT: Oh, I forgot, I made a video recording of FoI, which you might or might not enjoy. Spoiler: I die. I must admit that because of FoI I will go to bed one hour later than planned. (Is it clear that I'm trying to say that it's interesting enough to waste your time on it? Because I'm tired and not sure my phrase there is 'gettable'. O_o Moving on..) Lavirinto 3D 0.6.2 Lavirinto 3D is now of version 0.6.2 and com...

OGRE 1.6.0 aka Shoggoth is the newest version of the acclaimed 3D engine. I don't understand anything that's on the changelog , but it obviously goes beyond bugfixing and tweaking. :) There are no recent pre-compiled packages available, so the source way is the way to go, for now. The Infinity Engine's clone GemRB had some DONE s added to it's TODO , when version 0.3.1 was released a month ago. OpenMW , an OGRE-based engine for TES3 's game data, is now 0.5-versioned. Considering that the project started in this year's june, this number is quite impressive! Does this mean that we will have a final version of OpenMW by the start of 2009's summer? :D However, animations, interaction and user interface are not yet implemented. Also: check out these videos that show the progress of the engine so far. cocos2d-iphone is yet another LGPL-ed game framework and you can probably guess the platform it's designed for :). However, freedom freaks will argue t...

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you. Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details. It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video: Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track. There's a new development release of Oolite , the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 ( announcement , changelog ) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project. FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say. Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video...

LordsAWar! 0.1.3 LordsAWar! reached an (unstable) 0.1.3 release . After installing some game-uncommon libraries and compiling for half an hour, I expected to move some units around for some turns and stop playing from being bored. But actually, I enjoyed the simple game rules. LordsAWar! has decent graphics and good music. I like very much that the game cares about the player by providing a 'restore crashed game' button. The game did crash once, but think I shouldn't have started it together with an other app from the same command line and then moved the game window while it was generating a level... :) Actually LordsAWar! makes a stable impression. The only thing that confused me in some situations is the path finding. Units would walk in a zig-zag pattern instead of straight lines. I think this might be because vertical/horizontal and diagonal movement is equally expensive and that the behavior is not a bug. LordsAWar! 0.1.3 [ direct download ] After the absence of an o...

Widelands A quick one today. Firstly, I forgot to mention Widelands yesterday. A new version, a release candidate for build13, is available for download . The changelog is immense, so it should be large improvement over build12 which, for me, felt a little unpolished. Some of the highlights of build13 are: More stable multiplayer FPS regulation for less CPU usage Improved economy routing Many new sounds Many new graphics and animations especially for the Atlanteans Balancing work for all tribes Not to harp on too much about Scourge , but I find the recent AI updates fairly fascinating. Developer lordtoran describes the effect of the change to a decision matrix from the crude system that used to be in place before: Creatures that can't reach a location behave a lot more intelligent now: For example, if a monster can't reach you because you are surrounded by other monsters, it will loiter a bit and then throw a damaging spell or heal someone. When one of your attackers fal...

Something important happened last night. Something transformational. Qubodup designed a new forum logo . :-) For those that don't follow the planet , which is titled "news" in the link bars ^^, there have been some great game updates lately. Vega Strike ship: MK32 This update on Vega Strike is a great read with some screenshots of the many gorgeous new models that have gone into the game. They also have a new gallery system since the old one was fairy broken after the Sourceforge web hosting service updates. Scourge gets plenty of planet-time these days with a (now 7 week strong) weekly update. Over the last few months there's been an AI overhaul, lots of optimization and leak fixing, an item model/artwork overhaul, and lots of miscellaneous small improvements to the game. Short of a nice animation system and character model pipeline (most of the character models are assorted free[ware] md3 models) the game is looking very good indeed. Once better support for ...

Free Art Search shared media map Free Art Search , the svn/cvs/git media tracking application developed by hagish and ghoulsblade, now has an overview over the data that is shared between different projects. I find this tool very exciting! It shows how open sourcing media does help projects and if it was more detailed, one could see what media-demand exists.