Gaming Daily A-Z

Fictional Air Combat 0.1.3 I recently discovered YAFS on SF.net: Fictional Air Combat , which is an action flight simulation at an early development stage. There are 32 bit Win/Lin releases available , but the Linux release contains source which can be easily recompiled for 64 bit systems. (So did I.) I have not yet tried to find out the licenses/authors of 3d graphics and textures (and don't know if I will). It seems however that they are all original. (And I like them.) There is no sound yet. Height map for FAC Levels get created from height maps and a texture placement file, which has an own graphical editor for it (though I wasn't able to find the tool). Fictional Air Combat reminds me of Thunder&Lightning , which was unfortunately updated last time nearly one year ago. Fictional Air Combat V_0.1.3 Watch the video in high definition .

O_o is how I feel right now So I was browsing the FSF homepage because I wanted to dig up some info on their PDF priority project - but never mind that - and then I think "Let's check out them job listing !" and I do and then BAM! Game Test Analysts, (Santa Monica, CA) . So I think to myself "Yeah, right! This has a logical explanation to it! Game theory I bet! So I click it and BAM! O_o! It's a real job offering for beta testing video games and it's posted on the Free Software Foundation's home page! So it's probably not a commercial open source game project that this is about, but apparently one will test the game on the GNU/Linux platform and most likely use open source tools for bug reporting. Nothing *really* spectacular, the pay is 10 Dollars per hour, but together with World of Goo being released for Linux, I certainly do get the impression that the penguin becomes relevant for selling games faster. Sometimes I catch myself trying to figure ou...

Scorched 3D version 42 is out ( full changelog ). New features include: Scorched3D Optimized graphics rendering to take better advantage of hardware Scripting language support for weapons and server scripts Much larger landscapes supported Added multi-lingual support for chatting and player names Added localization support for dialogs and messages Some gameplay adjustments Better LAN/Internet communications for less timeouts Some new maps For those who don't know, it's a 3D artillery game with destructible terrain and sumptuous graphics. One thing I always think when I look at Scorched3D; why hasn't somebody re-used the engine in a different type of game? Nice effects, destructible terrain, there's plenty of possibilities there. VDrift has emerged from the other side of a ground up refactor/rewrite with release 2-15-09 . This is quite good news as projects as big as VDrift rarely survive a rewrite. Author Joe Venzon describes the highlights of the release: I thi...

Rigs of Rods is going open source . How cool is that? Rigs of Rods (also known as RoR), is a truck, car, airplane and boat simulator. You can drive, fly or sail in total freedom in an open environment. What makes RoR different to most simulators is its unique soft-body physics: vehicles chassis and wheels are simulated in real-time as flexible objects, giving the simulation an extremely accurate behavior, while allowing the vehicles to be simply specified by their structural composition, as a network of interconnected nodes (forming the chassis and the wheels). Crashing into walls or terrain can permanently deform a vehicle in a realistic manner. In addition to its unique soft-body physics, RoR also features an advanced flight model based on blade element theory, allowing the accurate simulation of any airplane, base on their physical dimensions and wing airfoils. It also features an accurate buoyancy model based on elemental pressure gradients, enabling boats with complex hulls to m...

Welcome to a Free Gamer special! People often accuse the Free software and open source game sphere of lacking depth, that there are few good games. In 2009 Free Gamer is dedicated to dispelling this myth. As part of a series of articles on specific genres, highlighting the games that people develop for the love of development in order for us to play, I humbly present a set of reviews of open source city building and tycoon games. I try to be fair and critical, and I note that these games are all enjoyable in their own way. They are all certainly worth a look. OpenTTD OpenTTD I started with OpenTTD 0.6.3 - being the only formerly commercial game I'm covering today, it is good a metric for the others. Still, it is not quite Free software, you need the abandonware Transport Tycoon Deluxe to run it. The community has been working on a project called OpenGFX to create both drop-in and high-resolution graphics to replace the proprietary materials. They are getting there, but I ...

The somewhat stop-start development of the various Tux Racer projects continues, but it looks hopeful that the latest incarnation of the iconic downhill penguin racer will not disappear like its predecessors. Extreme Tux Racer has finally released an updated 0.5 beta (Windows, Ubuntu, source for other Linuxi) after several months of inactivity. It's getting a bit of optimization love after I (yes, me, important mega me) unleashed my wrath helped a new developer by putting him in his place realise that ETR is not too detailed, as he incorrectly surmised , but ratyher suffers from some poorly implemented features that could be done a lot more quickly. Amazingly, I was right. :-) I'm always right and I will rule the universe soon! At least, once I've been to the doctor about this over-active procrastination gland of mine. Smokin' Guns , a total conversion of Quake 3 to recreate the feel of the Wild West is probably undermentioned here, although the graphics are star...

Militia Defense Militia Defense is the first open source tower defense game that I enjoy and at the same time the first LÖVE -using game that I don't want to stop playing! The game features four unit types which can be upgraded and sold. It creates complexity through different terrain (grass/roof) and long reload times. Militia Defense is mostly inspired by the non-free flash game Budapest Defenders . Code and art were created by Tabasco and are covered by the MIT-license. I'm in the process of finding out the sound sources. Impulse Impulse is a futuristic racing game in an early development stage. It looks and sounds nice although so far only some media is being loaded and super-basic movement is possible. I hope the game will become playable soon. Impulse uses the Irrlicht Engine .