Gaming Daily A-Z

...FreeGamer? No not this time :p It's rather that the Spring RTS engine ran into some trouble with their long overdue 0.83 version and now decided to release 0.84 instead ;) Along with it comes also a new Zero-K release (0.9), which prompted one of their players to make a nice new trailer in anticipation: Zero-K fan trailer So...that's it for today ;) P.S.: Check out Zero-K's Planetwars metagame too. P.P.S.: Also Spring related... someone on their boards is looking for people to take over the development of another quite nice RTS game: Conflict Terra .

First 'mobile devices' contest  submission  by Mumu The current OpenGameArt challenge is ' mobile devices ' and ends on Monday, December 5, 2011. The contest before that was low on participants and  a survey was started  to figure out how to get more people involved. Becoming a WTactics character Taken from OGA:  WTactics  is currently offering  a chance to have your likeness on a WTactics card  in order to raise funds for the continued development of thier project.  From their website: Give our artists a picture of you or your beloved one and become a part of the game! The artist will create a nice portrait with your chosen class, clothing and equipment, making it an everlasting part of our game and the open source communities, turning it into an immortal memory. This reminds me of the  Fantasy Portrait Kickstarter project , which produced some pretty portraits but unfortunately still istn't finished yet. pzi's album cover Pal...

The wayward Goat strikes again! Freedroid 0.15 rc 1 : The plucky, 'puter punching penguin hack 'n slash RPG stalwart has had a new release recently, reaching the 0.15 rc milestone (how many years will it take them to get to 1.0, I wonder?) It adds lots of things, new quests, new guns, new abilities, UI fixes, editor tweaks... Lots of development happening there, so check it out! EDIT: Thanks to shirish for pointing out that it's still at rc 1 stage, and thus not a final release. IrrRPG Builder Alpha 2 A project that looked promising, and that I almost forgot about, is the RPG game IDE, IrrRPG Builder . Finally, a basic battle system is implemented, and the scripting system was improved as well, so it's getting pretty close to being feature complete.

Ha, you probably read it here first, since it is just an hour ago that it was uploaded! https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl Have fun tinkering with it! P.S.: A good dev forum for it is Doom3world .

So it seems Red Eclipse is having a "contest" for creating an official trailer for their upcoming 1.2 release. Nothing to win (except fame), but the guys from Sauerbraten (also Cube2 engine based, like Red Eclipse) recently did the same with a quite nice result:   New official Sauerbraten trailer So if you want to participate, have a look at their rules and check out these nice open-source tools for video capturing:  GLC ( short tutorial by our qudobup ) and editing: PiTiVi or KDEnlive (sorry for being Linux centric here :p ). In other news I can report that the Xonotic team is following up on their promise to report more news and developments on their Blog :) Check out the latest entry for a log read and many nice pictures. Personally I am currently most excited about the mod "Overkill" with tries to take some features of the well loved instagib mode (sadly so much that it is sometimes hard to find anything but instagib games :( ) like right click laser jum...

We're a week into what has been an absolutely thrilling experience so far. What was more of an experiment to see what some developers might pull off with the new Beta release has far exceeded our expectations. Prizes include a free copy of the upcoming "jMonkeyEngine 3 Beginner's Guide" and a free theme from the WooThemes shop. Additional prizes might be added. If you want to get caught up you should read the following articles: Brief Announcement Exhaustive Contest Rules Contest Prizes Even if you've never used jMonkeyEngine before, 1 and 1/2 months could be enough time to put a game together if you have some experience in Java programming and game development already. We highly encourage developers to download the jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK as the recommended route to a quick start. From there the wiki and community forum are mere clicks away. We hope this contest will bring some new blood into our lively community, and we trust you'll find it worth your while.

Unknown Horizons 2011.3 is out! Features are: Complete settlement AI ( details here ) Combat and diplomacy system Increase in performance (partially thanks to FIFE ) Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr) Nine new buildings, one new ship ( here are some) New statistic widgets Usability and interface improvements (for example the  in-game menu ) New maps and a parameters-based map generator The original announcement is here  and some more details about the new features here . [video:  Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Changes (voiced) ] Development is active and they are on the lookout for people to help out or even join: 2D/3D/Animation artists can find some tasks here Naval public domain painting lovers can help by finding some background art Interested in mechanics/story? Share your ideas for catastrophes ! Interesting screenshots and videos should be posted  here Feedback is needed for this release. It can be shared on the  f...

Couldn't really think of a fitting headline, but here is the bunch of randomly collected news from the FOSS gaming realm: First of all, OpenDungeons finally got a nice website and a blog (as mentioned previously). And in collaboration with OpenGameArt , the kicked off their art competitions again . SummoningWars also got a new website recently, and they have also released version 0.55 a few days ago. New Summoning Wars GUI Last but not least, the pledgie donation drive for 0 A.D. seemed to have payed off to some extend, so one of the main developers is now working full time on the game for one month. See here for his first report on things newly implemented (most notable a save-game feature). But... you can still donate to keep him motivated longer ;)

Settlers of Catan is a popular board game. In today's terms it can be described as very 'social' thanks to its trade mechanic, which can lead to exploitation, corruption, deception... all that fun stuff. There are a few open source implementations of the game rules, some of which I mentioned years ago and with two of them being updated recently, I decided to revisit them. First, a few fun facts in comparable table form, further below you'll find screenshots, impressions and feature lists. Enjoy! If you're looking for somebody to play against, why not try the #freegamer IRC channel? :) Thanks for hiponboy's (of SumWars fame) help at testing games and collecting data! Game Platform Activity © Infringement ™ Infringement Compilable? Pioneers (pio) C, GTK+ active Hex-tiles look suspicious None found Yes (./configure && make) Java Settlers of Catan (jsettlers2) Java active Yes ("Gorillaz" character portrait file in resources) Yes ("Settlers ...

Just as a quick follow-up to last weeks post about ET:Xreal: Version 0.3.0 got released today ! ET:Xreal 0.3.0 As you can see, it is still a long way to go to replace all the non-free assets, and graphics sure don't look quite as great as all the features of that engine would make you believe (which proves again: it is the artists making a game look good :p ), but it's a start and you can begin brushing up your ET skills again ;)

Testing Trigger's Physics [ source video ] Trigger Rally 0.6.0 for Linux (source portable) brings following new features: New (and old) contributed tracks and events New Practice Mode Paging on the Single Races screen to show all the available tracks Option to show speedometer in KPH or MPH Option to show digital speed on the speed dial ('hybrid' style) Fading track comment and GO at race start Freezing course time when passing through a checkpoint Tweak menu colors for more contrast PS: If I understand this tweet correctly, this means high-quality motor, drift and crash sounds for Speed Dreams that hopefully will also be usable in Trigger, SuperTuxKart and other racing games.

Phlipple Phlipple is an original puzzle game which could be useful for training thinking in 3D. It's available for Linux and Windows with 50 levels and there is a 100-level version for Android (EUR 1.70 / USD 2.30) and iOS (was it taken down? License drama senses tingling!). I don't know anything about the availability/license of the build instructions/scripts for the portable platforms and of the additional level files but assume they are closed. Phlipple is by Remigiusz 'mal1ce' Dybka, who also made Zaz (including a [proprietary?] version for Android ). Video:  Phlipple promo

About a year after the Wolf:ET source release, significant advances to the original game (in a playable and easily obtainable form) are sadly still MIA :( The quite promising ET:Xreal engine enhancement project is one possible exception, even though they just had to sadly announce that they wouldn't make their Nov. 5th first release date (I was originally waiting for news about this until then...). ET:Xreal with some Free high quality textures As you might have guessed, this project takes the advanced id-Tech3 (Quake3) renderer from the now defunct Xreal project and brings it over to the Enemy-Territory engine (also id-Tech3 based). But besides that it also aims to give the engine a general overhaul and possibly add additional advanced features like real physics etc. Additionally work has also started to replace the free-as-in-beer media from the original game, with much higher quality CC-by-SA textures to make use of the advanced engine features. To qoute one of the developers (...