Gaming Daily A-Z

OpenDarkEngine is a FOSS replacement for + improvement on the DarkEngine system used in the Thief game series by LookingGlass Studios as well as SystemShock 2 by LookingGlass and Irrational Games. They managed to get some things clicking, but the project kind of fell flat a couple of months back. Maybe with all the interest in Arx, someone fans of this (rather similar) game series would like to jump on this project and help out.

Today I would like to start a new regular (?) feature here on FreeGamer: The Dev-corner! As you should know by now FreeGamer is all about FOSS games, and of course the most important part of the FOSS development model is participation! So, yes that also means you! Yes you... don't think I am not seeing you... and don't switch to that other browser tab to hide from me ;) So with the new dev-corner we will try give you some easy introductions how to participate in FOSS game development, maybe do some more development focused developer interviews and so on. I also hope to get some guest bloggers to write an introduction into contributing to their projects or something like that... so if you are a developer interested in this contact us :) So what can I do? You though about contributing to a project already, but are not much of a programmer guy/gal? Well... there is an artist in all of us (it's in our genes the anthropologists say)! But getting started with that can be a bit s...

MTP Target has had a bit of a turbulent life; the game was designed to be monetized by a pay-for-features/content system and the lead developer closed the server code's source in order to "protect" this model. A couple of years later, the lead developer took down the servers due to conflict with players, effectively killing the game (a cautionary tale for all, I think). Tux-Target tried to implement an updated FOSS server from the 2005 sources but it never reached a workable state Last October (tardy free gamer) they brought the servers back online; so the game is back! Be sure to check out this foss-y classic and help awaken it from hibernation-stupor

Beware traveller. I am here to slay your computer. Unstable fun awaits, betas with bits that may break your bit cruncher. That's what open source is about. Blowing up people's PCs with untested, untried, untrustworthy alpha and beta amateur programmer software! Well, perhaps some of the programmers are not amateurs... Good news, settlers of the new world! (Or those who feel like settling new worlds but were born in the wrong period of history.) FreeCol 0.10-alpha has been released. Get it from the unstable version download area of their website (the current stable version is 0.9.5). Speaking of Free* games, did the latest FreeCiv beta get a mention? FreeCiv 2.3.0-beta1 supports gigantic maps and over a hundred simultaneous players. Development of VDrift is, as ever, ongoing. You can test out build 3030 put together on the 25th Jan. After a period of suffering regressions, some changes have been sidelined to bring the main development branch back to a more stabl...

According to FOSS game developer and Lips of Suna project lead Ari Mustonen (aka Nekotaku, amuzen) the answer is the perfect, intelligent, witty, dungeon crawler. As luck would have it he, along with the Lips of Suna dev team and supporters, have set about the monumental task of realising this vision , reaching a major milestone yesterday with their 0.2.0 release . For players, Lips of Suna, or LoS as it's known, is a cooperative online, persistent dungeon crawler/RPG, with deformable terrain, procedurally generated dungeons,seamless gameworld, actual player skills instead of leveling, and witty storyline giving the the player and any friends online the opportunity to do battle along side the world's five races as they descend into the depth of the dungeons of Suna to save their world. Unlike a lot of other RPGs/FPS of various flavours success will really depend on knowledge, cooperation, strategy as well as skill. The Freegamer team caught up with Nekotaku yesterday: FG: The o...

The Arx Fatalis porting effort has been going full steam ahead; a lot of developments on that project. They recieved a  Wiki sponsored by the PARPG guys, made  subreddit  to post updates to and have quite a few repositories where the different team members are working on the seperate goals of the project. Development wise, they recently achieved ingame rendering on linux using Winelibs. This is not the ideal solution for the project, but they want to get something workable ASAP so it is the quickest. As you can surely see, there's a lot that still needs doing; but it's tremendous progress in the short amount of time that they've been working on it so far.

"The thing's hollow..it goes on forever..-and -- Oh my God--it's full of stars!" Bowman's memorable utterance in 2001 A Space Odyssey encapsulates perfectly the way the space and its' exploration resonates with the imagination and nothing encapsulates the experience of stepping out and living amongst the stars as well as David Braben's immense procedural opus, the Frontier Elite/Elite series of games. The Elite and Frontier Elite series left a long shadow, inspiring academic work in procedural generation (see vterrain.org) but towering over countless emulation attempts, for both the depicted universe (space and surfaces of all objects on a scale of light years, to meters) procedural gameplay (location/assets/mission/incidental event combination, with a full range of mission types), interaction (action based reputation, politics etc.). Although a lot of academic work was done, like with a lot of areas of game development, not much in the way of actual reali...

Link Ever since the announcement of Project Durian , with its press release stating the aim of making a dark fantasy film aimed at young adults, I've been dreaming of the game they'll make using the assets and setting. The more the project developed, the more I drooled over the potential; it had all the necessary prerequisites for a fantasy action game/rpg: an epic quest, awesome fighting scenes, dragons... Screen from the Sintel Open Movie But time passed and nothing showed up; the Blender Foundation showed no plans for another official Blender Game Engine project... Until a bunch of unaffiliated Blender artists decided to have a crack at making the project themselves without the official sponsorship of the Foundation, and started the Sintel The Game project (yay Free Culture). Free Gamer has been a bit tardy in these developments though, the Sintel the Game project started just before July last year and have gotten pretty far in that time (a bit further than ...

Now, on the opposite side of the adver-spectrum, I present  AncientBeast , a Norse-mythology inspired multiplayer strategy game with roleplaying elements that has been in development for quite a while. It has a huge web presence, with a Facebook group , Twitter   account (hiss use identi.ca), Miro video group (nice!), DeviantArt group with tonnes of awesome art... We'll have to see what license they fall under in the end, the team are still pondering how they'll make an open game that can sponsor a couple of beers for the devs. See those circles? They show progress of the individual aspects of unit development Their development methodology is rather interesting as well, from the use of a shared Dropbox account to collaborate and share art, to the rather excellent Bestiary  system they've developed to introduce players to the different units in the game, their stats and abilities, and show the development progress of the indicated unit. Tha...

*%&§$! Get of my lawn, err blog you crazy machine-gun style bloggers ;) You are making my "one post a month" style look very bad! And I can't even find a day to fit my blog-posts in... Ok anyways... today I have a more sensitive topic... yes FOSS gamers have lives too. Hard to believe I know, but out there (yes, outside of your parents basement... the place where yo go for geo-caching) people have real parties (without the LAN- suffix) and they use FOSS games during those occasions! At least some do ;) Some of these strange species can be seen in the following promotional video for Performous (beware SFW underage nerd chick action): Performous video Performous is a all-in-one party game, meaning you will have the choice to embarrass yourself in front of your best friends (or clueless cannon fodder as we FPS hardcore gamers say ;) ) either by singing, dancing, drumming or strumming (e.g. guitar playing) (embarrassment level in the same order). But of course... Karaok...

Everyone's favourite (read: only) open-source spell-slinging fps, Weaver , has been crunching away with art and code over the past few months. We've given them a shout out a couple of times, mainly when XReal is mentioned; in case you've forgotten: Weaver aims to be a competitive shooter with an elemental spell casting system. They've taken a rather minimalistic approach to publicity: they don't have a introductory website, feed or any real way to keep up to date with their development other than their ticket tracker and rather quiet forums which are really not a good indication of the amount of work being done via their ethereal IRC channel (#weaver on freenode). Loading Screen WIP Some of the main developments of late has been work on the Menu and HUD UI's, a bunch of concept drawings by new artists who've discovered the project through some form of divination, and work on the maps/levels. Warning: OLD Video doesn't reflect current UI In this day and...

FaceTrackNoIR ( download ) enables a user to use any webcam,by moving their head very slightly, to control the free-look/xyz movement of any game, through joystick emulation via PPjoy for Windows or directly when the game developer has included support. Very popular with space/flight simulation community, this technology can be used with FPSs/3rd person RPGs as well. FaceTrackNoir uses the protocol developed for FreeTrack, among others , including FlightGear's own. Webcams known to work well with FaceTrackNoIR. Normally this type of control through head movement was very expensive, and required specialised IR cameras/lights/markers to acquire raw data which was processed through closed source software and sent to games via protocols like TrackIR, being aimed at the high end simulation users. The FreeTrack opensource project used cheap but specialised equipment, wrote their own processing software and sent the data to games via reverse engineered TrackIR protocol/FreeTrack pr...

Have a nice new FOSS game that no one knows about? Make it known through these (rather obvious) tried and tested ( not really ;) ) methods: Forums A Delicate Balance Make a nice generic post with a couple (not too many!) screenshots, relevant links etc. Also, remember to stick around and answer questions and generally contribute to the forums you are posting to, you don't want to be a spam bot ;) Post on the FreeGameDev forums ! Fastest way to get an article on the blog, and a bunch of helpful people willing to give you a hand with development ('' previous parenthesis ;) . Linux Distro Forums: Always a safe bet (links go to relevant gaming sections) UbuntuForums Gentoo Forums Fedora Forums Arch Forums Propaganda 0A.D. video posted in 2007 that still attracts players Make Video for Advertising goodness! Videos > Pictures > Words when it comes to marketing. Upload to Youtube/Vimeo/Vidsiteofchoice and attach it to the posts you make on the sites mentioned below Post ever...

OpenMW has released 0.9.0 ! For those that don't know, OpenMW is a project to write an entire 3d rpg engine from scratch , made compatible with Morrowind data formats (other formats can be added later) with the noble intention of setting the first target at being feature complete with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. And after that's achieved? "Ideas include multiplayer, improved graphics and animation, improved scripting and more flexible modding, a new editor, or moving on to Oblivion and other games"   sayeth their roadmap making them one of the most potential brimming opensource projects around. Basically at 1.0: All Morrowind mods will be compatible Total conversions that do not use Bethesda art or recreate them, will be totally FOSS, (0$ for people who've never brought Morrowind). Non-total conversions need the retail copy. Modder rage inducing technical restrictions/bugs removed, improved modability/interface (of the type that caused Tolkien b...