Gaming Daily A-Z

There has been some activity in the most prominent free (as in freedom) software 3D role-playing games DungeonHack, jClassicRPG and Radakan. DungeonHack Green, water and village in DungeonHack [ more ] DungeonHack (DH) 0.10 has been released in form of win&lin 32bit biaries and a few commits later I was able to compile the game on my 64bit Arch Linux machine. It is the first release of DH that does not rely on non-free libraries . I played the game for the first time and I was positively surprised. Not only can I move around in the nice-looking (endless) landscape but also fight, cast magic, pick up items, enter houses and dungeons as well as talk to npcs. Physics also work (see barrels video below). On the downside: the current code is crash-happy and there is little content: In toto three houses, two dungeons, two enemy types, two items, one non-player character, one spell). Zombie roasting á la DH The next DH aim is to create a typical RPG village, add some inventory and stat...

NAEV Items [ more shots ] NAEV 0.4.0 is out, a game of the space trading and combat simulator genre, inspired by the non-free Escape Velocity . Win32/lin32/lin64/mac binaries are available here . The new version has parts of the user interface changed and is better accessible, for example through in-game gui keybind editing. Three aspects of NAEV show that usability is a priority: 1) the tutorial is informative without overwhelming too much 2) most combats can be evaded through the run away -tactic (this might be unintended, but definitely liked by me). 3) The automatic jump system, that allows consecutive jumps to systems without having to manually repeat standard maneuvers gives much relief to the player. The changelog also lists better-looking visuals as well as new sounds and music tracks. As a bonus, all the art in the game is licensed under Debian-friendly licenses. [license.txt: audio , visuals ] Gameplay Wingmen fighters in action In NAEV the player starts with a small tradi...

Early OpenMW GUI implementation OpenMW is a re-implementation of the (non-free) TES3 Morrowind game engine, written in the D programming language. The engine makes use of OGRE and other open source libraries , features an own scripting language called "Monster" and the latest release has the version number 0.6. Out of curiosity, I asked Nicolay Korslund (the lead developer) one year ago what his motivation for writing OpenMW was. Later I decided to ask some more and now you can finally read the interview, in which Nicolay tells us about Git , OpenMW's development and whether or not to expect original games as a result of the OpenMW project. The interview Q1: What is your motivation for writing OpenMW? Initially the project was started a few years ago (somewhere around 2004-2005, don't remember exactly), out from desire to improve a game I loved and from frustration with bugs and issues that made it less fun than it could be. Having been a programmer for about a de...