Gaming Daily A-Z

The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems ). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post ] but as a forum user I received an email: A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our complete database including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them out of the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have our database. In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information: (1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through the forum, including all private messages. This information is now in the possession of the hacker. (2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if your password was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break the encryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactly this, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, you should immediately change your pas...

A PARPG Content Creation Refactoring Sprint was  announced  on May 23, 2011. Here are instructions on how to join and help: Register at Assembla Add and resolve tickets Join the #parpg  channel each Sunday at GMT  8PM

New Pages of Adventure graphics. OpenGameArt is looking for a hosting sponsor. The target is a dedicated server with following min. specs: Quad core, 64 bit CPU 4GB RAM 500GB hard drive space 1TB monthly transfer 1 gigabit connection 64-bit CentOS, RedHat or Fedora Root access and Autonomy

Quick Sunday afternoon rundown of recent strategy game updated... 0AD got a new beta 5 release , which improvements in rendering & AI code, a completely new faction (Iberians), and a new map: MegaGlest also got updated recently ( Version 3.5.1 ), bringing various fixes and performance improvements. Furthermore I can report that both the sable and the development version of Battle for Wesnoth have been updated, and I strongly recommend everyone (who has not played this game for a while) to retry this classic in the newest development version. EvolutionRTS , a nice looking (but sadly CC-by-NC-ND licensed) game based on the SpringRTS engine also saw an update to version 1.3 this month ( check out this gameplay video ). Hmmm, what else? Ahh, UFO:AI was ported to Android , and and the change of Warzone2100 from SDL to qt (which is not exactly a game framework) raised some eyebrows, but will probably make the game more easily portable and better integrated into your favorite deskto...

Funto's edit of the FGDWiki* made me realize that Newton switched to the free-as-in-freedom zlib license I did not follow development on the HPL1 (Penumbra: Overture) engine but this might mean that there are no closed dependencies any more. *having a forum account will allow you to edit this wiki!

On 2. July, the second Free-as-in-freedom USB Game Key will be released by the French-language based team LanPower . The GameKey light serie 2 is a compilation of portable FOSS games, mostly compatible with both Windows and Linux. English, German, French, Italian and Spanish translations are available for the GUI. If you would like to add your translation to the mix, here are the translation files: English  | French . (contact:  asso.lanpower A ✜ T free.fr)

This is a 0:46 soundwalk of BOFH . Music not turned off. [ download ogg vorbis ]

Spoiler alert regarding a video of a NAEV mission that shows off the sound capacities of the game. The project relies on OpenAL Soft . You should come for the sound [ 10MB vorbis rip ]* or for the HD version . Effects to notice: Positional sound (basic for OpenAL) Doppler Effect (depends on velocity) Air absorption factor (sounds like you’re under water) Reverb (also helps make it sound like you’re underwater) Speed of sound changes (depends on nebula density – also for sounding underwater) * It'd be great if more project took so much care of audio licensing so there could be f-a-i-f game sound walks. Great distraction  from urban noise. Game soundtracks are disturbing though mostly. An amazing screens-video of the different stages of modernizing/Xonoticisizing  CBCTF1 - Space CTF to  Newtonian Nightmare   was posted .

I took a quick look at the Gluon Talk and the games booth at LinuxTag 2011 and thought I'd share some pictures at least. :)

Iris2 We haven't typed a word about Iris2 in over two years! There are quite some new bugfixes to the 3D UO client. The latest stable release (rev 3395) is one week old. Iris2 was updated to use Ogre 1.7.2, it now runs stable on Windows. This old video is still pretty much up-to date The project mainly suffers from lack of community interest and aid in creating or converting free assets or hosting servers. :) A few trees seem to be hard enough (but there's more ). RunUO appears to be a popular server suite. I made a feed of the Iris2 wiki news.

Octower! BAM! Word War Vi runs on Pandora ! (Have a feed !) Split-screen! BAM! Egoboo alive, kicking and now has a pretty website! Lazza made a feed ! Code! BAM! jClassicRPG development continues !

Gluon Creator The Gluon project is A 2D game creation IDE A game player which is supposed to become cross-platform, including mobiles and tablets A site/community/server which will feature ratings, tags, avatars, achievements, etc. Read more about the vision here  and about the history in  this Amarok blog post . Gluon team member Leinir will appear at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany with his English-language talk  Social Game Distribution . Hm... anybody got spare tickets? [got some thanks to ben!] :)

Goblin Camp is a roguelike citybuilder, inspired by Anno 1404, Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper. 0.15 is the most recent version (April 23). I looks cute and fun and there are Win & Lin releases. I also watched part of the well-done tutorials: To be honest: I'm shyed away by the apparent deep micromanagement and by my prejudice against roguelike controls.

Better late then never they say... so today I bring you the news that the grand-daddy of point and click adventure game creation software, AGS , has been open-sourced recently . For AGS there are literally thousands of fan made games available ( picture taken from this one ), and even though most of them (all?) are not FOSS, it is definitely nice to have the engine and the editor now under the pretty liberal and GPL compatible Artistic License 2.0.

Flattr allows you to place a "click me because you appreciate me" button on your site and when somebody clicks it, you get a bit of money. So far you had to invest at least 2€ to be part of the service. Now you can use it for free. So every project that is a one-person project or has a donation infrastructure: please add flattr to your site. If neiter fits: start thinking about how you would share donations with the team if you got any and add a flattr button when you're done. :) Thanks to Grumbel for reminding via his post .

Pax Britannica Somehow I found out about Pax Britannica a while ago and found it to be an addicting game, even though I only played it agains AI so far. The resource is time and your task is to decide what to build, while fighting happens automatically and no movement controls are given. In fact all you can do is press a button and the duration of that press will result in different actions. Up to four players or 1-vs-AI are supported. Good Pax Britannica review The license is MIT although I don't know whether it applies to art as well.

I'm looking forward to the LGM this year . Bart, admin of OpenGameArt will talk about running libre graphics projects . You can view previous year's talk videos here . Version 3 of Blendswap is live! But the site has some server load problems . OpenArt , Moosader 's own take on game resource sharing has been updated and has content under CC0 and CC-BY v3 licenses. It received a visual update a while ago.

Evil Cult [ latest version ]. One of my favorite games. A 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) turn-based game with little micro-management so far (I consider this a huge plus). The developer recently posted a blog update . You can follow him on Twitter . Much development discussion is going on in this thread . I made two videos of the gameplay: a 5x time lapse and an Let's Play for your pleasure. Evil Cult 5x speed Music by (c) Natlyea Evil Cult Let's Play Regarding 4x games: There's an ongoing Master of Orion 2 rewrite. Latest activity in the repository: Mon Apr 11 11:55:42 2011 +0200. Here 's a custom news feed if you want to follow the project. (I won't be adding custom feeds to the planet for now). I also created a news feed generator for FreeOrion.

Remember Justin Nichol's CC Portraits Marathon? There's an update [ kickstarter | justin's blog ]! I had an injury earlier in the year which kept me preoccupied, and then school started. The pace should be much quicker from this point on and I apologise for the delays. In any case, I have these 10 and about 23 others to complete (with 2 additional portraits of my choice to finish the 35 I guaranteed). I intend to complete the bulk over the next month and a half, and will try to post the fruits of my labor every Wednesday from this point forth, so if you don't see anything from me one wednesday, feel free to bug me.