Gaming Daily A-Z

So it seems that Scorched 3D , Wormux , Hedgewars , and Atomic Tanks are all clones of inspired by... Worms ? No. Scorched Earth ? Nah. Gorillas ? Nope. Tank Wars ? No. That's right, their roots go all the way back to a 1980 on the Apple II under the name Artillery . Even earlier ascii versions from as early as 1976 are reported. Now that's real history - all other games (pong and chess excepted) are modern upstarts. ;-) Atomic Tanks home • screenshots • download One of the older and more mature open source Artillery clones, with version 0.5 first available in January of 2003, Atomic Tanks doesn't seem to have the online presence of it's contemporaries. This is probably because it doesn't look that nice, with garish colours, coarse widgets, and almost badly drawn sprites. Update: Markus comments, "I am sure that the graphics and such in Atomic Tanks are intentional. It is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Scorched Earth, and for those of us...

Update: brain malfunction. I first posted 2.7.0, then 2.7.7b, but the correct _stable_ version of Egoboo is 2.7.0b and the development version is 2.7.7, got it? =/ Thanks for the pointer, maststef A new stable Egoboo 2.7.0 2.7.7b 2.7.0 wraps up several months of development and bug fixing. This project has really come back to life over the course of 2008. It is very well tested with a lengthy changelog . If I had make a criticism, it would be that Egoboo really looks dated these days and perhaps they could renew focus on nicer textures and more detailed models - perhaps aspiring to be a bit closer to SoulFu in quality - but graphics do not a good game make. It's great to see the project successfully revived from a lifeless piece of bitrot that it had become a few years go. Now it's a pretty smooth looking experience. Check out this (slightly rambly) video review: Unknown Horizons 2009.1 was released several days ago. It now resembles a game, you can build a city, ...

The great thing about open source is a project can never become extinct - there is always a chance of it being brought back to life either by the original authors who re-find their motivation, by new contributors who see the potential, or a mixture of both. Here are the top 10 games, complete with cliches, I'd like to see return to the development scene and back on the road to completion. 1. Bloodmasters home • project This gorgeous 3D top-down action game was released as open source last year after indie developer Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden found he'd lost motivation to continue with the project. It's a complete game with great graphics and needs a good C# developer to pick it up, port it to Mono, and help restore the community . 2. Project Citadel home • project A very nice looking turn based strategy game set in World War II. The game reached a playable state before it's development team ByteWare stopped playing the development game. 3. Windstille home...

Quantum Quantum is a simple, minimalist-look rts game in which you try to control a network of planets. It can be played in multiplayer mode against human players and provides a Java Webstart package for a one-click start (works for me). It is a clone of Dyson . The game reminds me of qonk a lot. Both share a similar look, are about conquering planets with the help of dots and the computer enemy can be hard to overcome. Quantum is more complex, as unit creation has to be managed but also provides an automatic waypoints mechanic. Qonk's planets are moving, which make the game a bit more fast-paced. KGB Training Simulator, PyDay 6 entry PyDay #6 just finished. The 24 hour python game development competition's topic was "surveillance", which mostly resulted in "move around and avoid triangular fields of view" games. To rate all nine games , you will have to register and open the projects' pages. Caterpillar Fever Dream, PyDay 5 winner Two weeks ago, Py...

I recently noticed two free 3D landscape generators and thought to myself: "I bet there are dozens of never-finish terrain generators for games and vr apps!" I was wrong. In this article, I will introduce the handful of floss scenery generators and editors that I was able to find. InnerWorld InnerWorld is a Blender -based landscape generator that shines through a nice online documentation . Landscapes are generated from Blender noise functions or external sources. The tool's specialty appears to be object placement . The project is four years old and the last release ( 0.0.5 ) is two months young. Terraform Terraform is an open source interactive height field generation and manipulation program, giving you the ability to generate random terrain and transform it. The project seems to be non-living - last CVS activity: August 2003. Hme Height Map Editor is a 2D GUI for generating and precise-editing height maps. It is cross-platform and has a KISS philosophy. However...

Clipart! - Thanks Tranberry ! A survey was started to explore the potential of open source gaming business. It consists of 20 detailed questions about how you would fund games and what acts of commercialism you consider moral for free software. Time to fill it in ! Survey 'preview' The questionnaire has been created by Andrew Fenn, lead dev of Hardwar (a Hardwar remake ^^), who announced it in the FGD Forum and later, on his blog . The survey was inspired by a similar one by evit, which unfortunately was not well formulated and rather Linux-centered, than free software-centered. Another drawback of evit's survey is that the results were not published. Andrew's survey's results will be published on his blog (and will not contain any critical data like IP address of course). So as I said, take your time to participate . Also: support the survey through digg and fsdaily ! :)

There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI , the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.) Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though. FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved. Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced...

"Damn Free Gamer is popular." So says the L-echo developer, as well as posting graphic illustration on the project home page. L-Echo is a free and open source clone of the game Echochrome (aka Mugen Kairou). Version 0.4.3 arrived in early February, although performance was unplayable on my non-hardware-accelerated laptop. Freedroid RPG version 0.12rc1 - a 2D isometric RPG, a bit like Diablo, but not like it at all. There's lots of bug fixes, a new tutorial, a new starting level, lua scripting, and more! Help them playtest it so that version 0.12 is solid. " Tesliz ", a 3D turn based strategy game, inspired by Wesnoth, written in Python on top of OGRE. Early days here. Speaking of Wesnoth had lots of updates over the Christmas period, building up to a stable 1.6 release. That game has some amazing artwork these days, like these wizard portaits . They have lots of playtesters already. If you don't know what Wesnoth is, crikey, just click the link a...