Gaming Daily A-Z

Xenogear: Fighting Elly's Gear Xenogears is one of my favorite games of all time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it was a Japanese RPG for the Sony PS1 in 1998. Not everyone agrees that it was an amazing game, but it's undeniably one of the longest, most plot-heavy RPGs ever made, especially given the fact that most of the plot is in the form of the main story line as opposed to random side-quests that have very little to do with the overall goal. Xenogears is particularly interesting in that each time you play it through, you'll pick up more and more little plot details that you missed the first time around. This is because not only does it have a massive main plot, it also has a massive back story spanning several thousand years, which is only really revealed in small details that are only apparent once you're already familiar with the main plot. By this time, some of you are probably wondering why I'm raving about a proprietary console game on ...

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project... Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006. ...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features : Glest The original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared to the continuations. Glest: Advanced Engine aka GlestAE A community-led continuation of Glest by adding features and rewriting significant portions of the Glest codebase. Mega Glest With frustrations growing about the lack of stability of early GlestAE work, and the length of time between releases, a prolific modder started to add key features such as improved multiplayer, a 'mega pack' of mods (which inspired the name), and port useful changes back from GlestAE - the result was MegaGlest. For some good videas of both forks...

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines. They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay (take that Julius :P). So yeah, check it out!

Remember when we talked about Lugaru getting ripped ? I just got reply (twice) from Wolfire that the licensing information described in this file is correct. [ first ticket ( img ) | second ticket ( img )]. Probably the permission was given in private conversation or in the hidden Wolfire forum . I'm so glad they did license hard-to-recreate data as open content! Hopefully some completely free/open source project will come out of this. (There are many more steps/files to go though.)

In his first Lessons from Bulletstorm post , m64 talks about the importance of Level Design, Editors, Core Gameplay and Mechanics Tweaking for open source games (although most is general gamedev related). First, a disclaimer – Bulletstorm is a big, single-player heavy, action game. If your game is different, the observations might not apply. Some observations are shaped by how Unreal Engine 3 works and might not be easily applicable to games created with other engines. Some might be difficult to apply due to technical limitations of an Open Source process – like having to exchange data through the Internet. Without any further ado, here goes. Speaking of development: PARPG is doing an Agile/Scrum-style one-month sprint. This means that the whole team is working towards a handful of goals and that there are 30-minutes progress and planning reports twice a week [ announcement ]. The main theme of this development month is "Player Character Creation". I'm currently cont...

Space combat tutorial [MUTE (couldn't record audio on win)] Space Combat is a low-end 3d space shooter/simulator and holds promise through it's low-entry-curve tutorial*, which features computer voice. The voice is obviously-generated, although I couldn't find out what software was used. Asteroid Field in Space Combat Space Combat runs on Windows (couldn't run it using Wine unfortunately [ Linux port request here ]). The project has two positions to be filled: Mission designer Missions (and campaigns) are XML-files that contain lists of objects and scripts. You can also create own AI-scripts. 3D Modeller The game is in need of 3d objects for space ships, stations, objects... This makes me wonder: can any developer report success at using SF.net's Help Wanted system ? (Even for getting art creators on board? :) ) Or do you perhaps know of other such listings projects could use? *I didn't get much further yet ^^

The " Is it possible to make money " thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features': FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [ announcement ] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says: Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive ! This makes me wonder: how to motivate donations towards open source games (besides making a good game ;) ). Kambi (VRML) Engine has introduced a fundry.com page for project pledges, feature pledges and donations [ announcement ]. Fundry.com looks interesting and like an easy way to play the 'donation game', a concept I talked about long ago. Fundry currently accepts paypal only. The only other open source game projec...

A long time ago, on the old FreeGameD ev forum, I heard of Purity ; an original game based on the idTech3 engine. Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago. But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting: In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end. In order to do that, you have 4 weapons: -The PULS attack : a red rocket. It allows you to activate red switches, and it allows you to jump. Right, in purity, you have no "jump button". You wanna jump? Shoot your feet, and you'll be sent in the air. There is no lives or damage in purity, so it is not a big deal to shoot right between your feet. You can also shoot the walls while you're in the air to project yourself higher. People who know DeFrag won't be surprised by this technique. -Th...

Avoision & FBG2 Avoision and Falling Blocks Game 2 were reviewed 5 weeks ago in the Simple & Polished post and I got curious about the perspective of a small-foss-games developer (the interviews we have had so far were rather with big project developers). Their developer Jared "Deraj"  agreed to a short interview. Hey Jared! Where are you from? How's the weather? What do you do in life? I'm from Washington (USA). Right now, it's cloudy outside, but somewhat warm (considering it's winter here). I work in software development for a large technology company. Did you create Radius Engine as a first step towards a game you want to make or was it more of a programming exercise? What is the next step? Adding engine features? The Radius Engine as it exists today is indeed a stepping stone towards my eventual goal of creating an extensible scrolling shooter ("shoot 'em up"). Avoision and Falling Block Game were both games I wanted to create, b...

OpenMW 0.9 is now available for download . Features: Exterior cells - loading, unloading and management Character Creation GUI Character creation Make cell names case insensitive when doing internal lookups Music player NPCs rendering No screenshots I'm afraid! DH concept art from the " clothing the Estonian " thread DungeonHack will have a new software architecture [ git repo ], estimated to be showcased very soon. [ announcement ] I noticed that both projects have a "Contributions Wanted" link which leads to their milestone/roadmap tickets (on a wiki page) [ dh / owm ]. I get the feeling it's time to start using trac, as does PARPG for example . :)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of  ProFlightSimulator , a fork of FlightGear  on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post . ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game. This info is placed in  Disclaimer/Terms / IsThisFlightgear? . The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file  containing " Source code of these images, content and files "  (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here ) . Why PFS is not FlightGear The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation . I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for e...

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL . The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license .  Here's an explanation  by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository. Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say: "we have every legal right to market and sell the software" "the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge." Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down. The implication, according to Wolfire: "While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it i...

The following is a guest post by the president of the French language gaming community LanPower [ fr-en translation ] which distributes game compilations. Gamekey 2 games The LanPower association is a French group of network game players. We contribute to Free Open Source ("libre") games by producing CD/USB compilations of games: "LanPower Games CDs" and "Gamekey". The Gamekeys are composed of portables games. These compilations are for Windows but all the games also exist under Linux. The last series are compatible with Linux thanks to Wine. Thus the Gamekey light serie 2 is the first compilation of portable and free open source games to be compatible with both Windows and Linux (as well as MacOS X and Solaris). Links: Our web site Description of the Gamekey Light Series 2 (english) We intend to translate the Gamekey and the other compilations in several languages if we find the time or get translation help or donations. An international (5 languages) ve...

  FGD Forum + Wiki As an anti-spam and pro-convenience measure, you can now log into the FGD Wiki using your FGD Forum phpBB account! Please test this and comment on this post or start a thread if there are any inconveniences. :) We're interested in a major re-structuring of the wiki by the way, suggestions are welcome. Have you found the Free Gamer Blogger in you yet? Join us... By the way, you might not have noticed it but we also welcome guest posts! See this thread for information. Propaganda time! And if you feel like spreading the word about our community a little, you're welcome to use these gfx / templates .

It isn't nearly fluffy enough... missing that horn on its forehead... and it's not riding on rainbows... This should be fixed -lenir What I'm trying to say there is (obviously) that FreeSiege ( git repo here |  screens here ) is looking for help updating the assets (and they're looking for an awesome horse I think). So if you know any freely licensed one.. can and want to model one yourself.. or perhaps want to improve the pony (see quote above).. here's the thread to go to. :) In other news:  GameKit 2 is now available on the Blender wiki.

Xenowar Xenowar is simple turn-based squad tactics. It had one or two recent releases . Gameplay is not at all as deep as UFO:AI goes but quicker to get started with and fun too. I tested it on a friend's HTC Wildfire [ spec ]: it was quite laggy and either the screen is too small or my fingers are too big. :) Or maybe I just lack touch-screen-experience. Please excuse this laggy and kind-of-broken recording..

(edit: Construct 2 is going Closed Source, I'll either edit out this part or keep it for reference, but don't get your hopes up when reading this) Scirra Construct  is one of the few FOSS competitors to the proprietary GameMaker 2D game development suite ( Gluon , Enigma and  Game-Editor being the others). Unfortunately, the system has been limited to Windows since its inception due to relying on DirectX fiddlies, however, that has all changed... Construct 0.x Showreel Yesterday the long awaited Construct 2 project released a public alpha . No longer are Construct games chained to Windows; instead, games can be exported to HTML (5) which is pretty much on the opposite spectrum of platform-lockin. Construct 0.x Interface Now, one significant problem is that the editor isn't cross platform, and relies on a Windows GUI lib. However, seeing as the games are now cross platform, maybe the FOSS gaming community can show their appreciation by helping with the porting proc...

OpenDungeons , a long-time Freegamedev project has been through a lot of changes since it started on the Freegamedev forums , going through a lead-dev swap and a major re-write. In the years since we last mentioned them, they've actually produced something playable: lots of new code and artwork has been contributed by a small but dedicated team of contributors and it has been shaping up to be an exemplary FOSS game. There's still lots of work that needs doing though: loads of creatures that need concept art, models and scripting, room tiles that need textures and models, and game design work that needs finalizing. There's a lot of ideas floating around on the forums that need art and implementation With all the work that's gone into the project, they're busy readying up another release. Unfortunately they've had a bit of trouble with ubuntu/debian packaging (and linux packaging in general), so if anyone out there would like to give them a hand, it would really b...

I take it my comments regarding the Spring RTS engine were not taken so well... so I will present some (in my opinion) much better and less messy to setup RTS games ;) One, I really like to come back to is Glest ! The previously featured version/fork of that game, Megaglest ( Edit: Now links to their awesome new webpage, how did I miss this ;) ), just released another version (3.4.0) with quite a lot of new features. Newest Megaglest gameplay It now got a new build-in IRC client for multiplayer chatting, can transfer missing files from the server (useful for all those custom maps you can find ;) ), some performance and stability improvements as well as the usual assortment of new maps and map-themes. Ah and to come back to the headline: A new faction, the Romans were added ;) The Contestant Of course, adding Romans to the game is poaching in an other's territory... that of the Greeks ;) So lets have a look at the recent developments in 0 A.D.: New 0 A.D. gameplay They are progre...

Another game from the well of innovation that is the SpringRTS community, Contact aims to be an Open-Source squad based RTS . It uses models from the DOTA-like attempt "Engines of War" which unfortunately never really got anywhere, other than a couple of nice mechs. The Contact team released a beta on the 25 Dec last yea r, so it's not exactly breaking news, but the project is still moving forward and could use a couple of eyes if anyone is interested in it. Forum Thread with more screenies