Gaming Daily A-Z

Rejoice! Now you can become the CEO of a multinational evil energy empire on your home PC. Build as many nuclear power plants as you always wished, destroy the world's climate with coal electrification and make a big advertisement campaign to greenwash your evil plans with some wind-mills ;) Energy Tycoon You can download this great looking game called Energy Tycoon , for Windows and Linux, and the source-code is available under a MIT/BSD like license. It includes some non-free parts however (e.g. irrklang AFAIK) and the media license is unclear, but it's rare that such a polished game shows up as open-source more or less out of nowhere. Quick selection of other news A rather interesting GPL licensed racing project was recently released for the Blender game engine (BGE): SAAB-91 Virtual Race . Interesting especially because it seems to have some sort of official support by the designers of the car, but currently it is still at a very early stage. It's also nice to see th...

Neotron Games These guys have compiled quite a selection of quality, complete games. Actually, to such an extent, one could say that they are one of the most prolific open source game devs out there, even if not all of their works are completely "open". Most of their games are compatible with the GPX-Wiz, and hopefully the Pandora once Bennu , the language they use for developing their games, gets an official port. Before we were Dead : Under the sea RPG Play as one of 4 fishy characters, all with their own individual abilities and personalities in an atmospheric underwater world. Explore the multitude of scenic aquatic environs and immerse yourself in the lore presented through branching NPC dialogue and interaction, the choices you make being apparent as the game progresses. This of course means that there is a lot of text to read, so I wouldn't quite recommend the game if you just want a quick blast of arcadey action... Nether Dimensional Runner : Trippy Platformer Fa...

Wait... isn't this Free Gamer? Why do you have a commercial game on your blog about free games? Well... because it is free, just not as in beer ;) Okok, the first episode is even free as in beer :p What am I talking about? Steel Storm , an indie arcade top-down shooter: Steel Storm Episode I trailer Steel Storm is based on the GPL engine Darkplaces , and its media license is even "almost" FOSS too with the CC-BY-NC-SA license . This makes it possible to use its engine enhancements (like a in-game editor, a really nice menu system, etc) also in other open-source games! I think this is actually not a bad compromise between trying to cover some expenses and still making open-source games, and that commercial efforts are not strictly incompatible with FOSS game development can be discussed here ;) It would be cool though, if they would consider a "ransom" design also, i.e. that the game becomes completely FOSS after a certain sum of sales has been reached. Oh and...

Hot news for today! A project unknown to me so far just released its first alpha of their upcoming open-source RTS Galactic Vice . It's still at a very early phase, and they are looking for contributors , but as you can see in this video (action starts at 0:45) it's looking like a great start already: Galactic Vice RTS Alpha1 Their aim is to create a RTS similar to Starcraft2 or Dawn of War, and they are making good progress towards this goal. Currently you can even download the alpha binaries for Linux64bit and windows 32bit . Very interesting is also their approach to create a tile based 3D map system, for which some examples can be found here . They are also plan on using Blender3D as their content creation tool, which is cool ;) Not so cool is that only the source code is GPLv3, while the data is CC-NC-ND >:( Edit: They plan on releasing the data also somehow under the GPL... lets wait and see how exactly. Edit2: After some discussions I was able to convince them to l...

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK. So, where to start? Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown , which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates , a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself: Octaspire:Crates Tutorial A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare) , which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world". If you are following the development of the p...

Ok today I have updates for two real FOSS gems. First of all the long promised update on ZeroBallistics : the former indi, now FOSS tank shooter. A few weeks ago thy made all the game (including even .blend model source files!) available under the GPLv2 (and the media also under CC-BY-SA ) so even the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts will be pleased :) After some trouble compiling it (more on that later) I made a nice game-play video today (sorry for the low frame-rate, but my PC wasn't quite up to the task): ZeroBallistics game-play Pretty neat, isn't it? The developers are currently looking into getting their master-server and website back up running soon, but are also looking for more people to help them out! There is especially one problem that needs to be solved however: Currently it still depends on the un-free Raknet3 for networking, so it's not possible to distribute GPL binaries. There is an older GPL version of Raknet2 which could be maybe used ( we talked about it...