Gaming Daily A-Z

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 ( announcement ) has been released . The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes. The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt: Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more. Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain su...

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p New to the feeds is our revision control planet , for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward. However, recently they released an auto-builds update script , which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released: Stunt Rally 1.2 Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode. Other things to mention? Mage is a open-sou...

It's time PyWeek #13  soon! The dates of this challenge are are 00:00 UTC 2011-09-11 to 00:00 UTC 2011-09-18 . Timetable Friday 2011/08/12 Registration underway Sunday 2011/09/04 Theme voting commences Sunday 2011/09/11 Challenge start Sunday 2011/09/18 Challenge end, judging begins Sunday 2011/10/02 Judging closes, winners announced Check out  PyWeek 12 's winners by the way: Loopback : Asteroids + Tower defense. Retro Look. Permissive code license. Loopback - PyWeek #12 Team Winner Lemming : Enough Plumbers + Canabalt??? Hand-drawn horrible ;). Permissive code license. Video: PyWeek #12: Lemming Speed Run The PyWeek guys seem to have figured out the license part of game prototyping well: Lemming for example contains a list of all used art pieces' urls and licenses. Neat! PS: Ludum Dare got 600-1 entries last weekend.

BZFlag There will be a tournament of the CTF game BZFlag . When : September 30th, at 5pm EST Where : Online(?) How : Visit  ohava.com/gametourney for sign-up. Prize : An  Ohava OpenBook BE awarded to the MVP of the winning team. More prizes will be given to all of the winning team's members.

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one. OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too. Alex the Allegator  was part-ported to HTML5  using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D DusteD , maker of Wizznic! is not dead . Blendswap  now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying. Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS . Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

Yes, I post only seldom, but when I do it I keep up the good old tradition of mixing totally unrelated projects in one big post :p So where to start today? Ahh yes: The puzzle type game Berusky 2 was recently FOSSified (code and art GPL) as pointed out in our forums (but I have to admit I saw it first on LGDB ). And as out great founder was quick to point out , it follows the great tradition of the first part with was also released under the terms of the GPL. In totally unrelated news, Lips of Suna version 0.5 got released last week, with a bunch of nice graphical and game-play improvements ( change log and discussion here ). For those living behind a rock, Lips of Suna is a crazy mix of Minecraft, slightly adult themed anime and a more classic RPG. Definitly worth a try, even though still under heavy development! Hmm and now a quick run-down of other (I'd say less important) news: Q3 Rally (now stand alone with the ioQuake3 engine) is nearing another release and OpenXcom is ...

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :) OpenGameArt 2 submission form FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing! FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash... A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2: FreeSound Bulk License Change If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY. I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011: Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got...

HGE's Particle Editor The proprietary games sale  Humble Indie Bundle has a tradition of including open source engine releases. In all of the other humble bundles there has always been at least one game that opened its source (in #2 it was revenge of the titans. in #1 it was penumbra, lugaru, aquaria and gish). - Fer C. Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages:  hge , hge-unix . The non-free BASS audio library was replaced with OpenAL. The hge-unix readme states "10 I don't know anything about the Windows version of HGE.", which might mean that developers have to juggle two engine versions and audio libraries if they want to support the three main platforms. Or hge-unix needs to be ported back to windows systems. You can read more about the port in the blog post HGE comes to Mac and Linux by Ryan Gordon ak...

LinWarrior r19+ Test Video I tested and recorded the latest LinWarrior git revision (a few changes since release19). Some of the new features in r19 and after include: Atmospheric daytime setting New units (Flopsy, Scorpion and Tank) Cockpit frame in first-person view Trees, trees, trees The LinWarrior engine is still being developed, for example mechs are still hardcoded rather than configured in textfiles right now. PS: A video of actual gameplay, rather than just testing the controls. Unfortunately no sound but 1920x1200 resolution... Playing LinWarrior r19+ [mute]

Cubosphere 0.1 Beta testing video The first beta release of Cubosphere is available. The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

Fast games for slow summer news weeks... but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p To start out... yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums , but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users. Noteworthy news related to that (albeit not strictly FOSS related): RedEclipse also got included into Desura now ( Moddb 's indie friendly answer to Steam, even with an upcoming Linux port). To avoid complains in the comments... I mention this here even though it is a closed source game distribution platform, simply because it can be a great way to promote (and maybe even sell?) FOSS games, and if we would finally be able to attract the modding community (which is largely represented on Moddb) to work with FOSS engines instead, it would be win-win for everyone involved. Despite its unfree cont...