Gaming Daily A-Z

You probably heard about it already, but for the sake of updating this blog and in case you might have missed it over the holiday stress: 0 A.D. got a pretty massive update to version 0.8 "Haxāmaniš"! 0AD 0.8 video The release news have all the details including the possibility to listen to the very nice soundtrack of the game. Oh and the developers are requesting to mention that they are still looking for contributors! Otherwise? Well there are some even older news regarding the Megaglest project: First of all, we didn't mention their new release yet: version 3.6.0.2 . It's mostly a bugfix and various smaller improvements release, but they also significantly improved the modding support. In releation to that I guess they also made the .blend sources of much of the content available . Something they are not required by the CC-by-SA btw, so many thanks to those guys! Other upcoming news for Megaglest are the inclusion into the official Debian repositories and an opt...

When: February 5th, 2012, 09:00 - 17:00 Where: Brussels, Belgium, Europe, Earth More info here

Short call for help: Awesome looking retro-graphics game is looking for a Darkplaces QC programmer. So far only two screen-shots have been released (and no word on the license of the media): I am loving the style... so here is the other: So if you know your way around Quake's QC scripting language try to get into contact with them :) Otherwise you can still follow the progress of this game over at QuakeOne's forums . Oh and taking about Darkplaces... Xonotic finally implemented client-side networked players in their most recent development release. Meaning that there is now client-side movement prediction and thus less (visually) laggy game-play on slower netspeeds!

New fantasy portraits by Justin Nichol [ more here ] Remember Justin  Nichol 's crowd-sourced  fantasy portrait commission? In  a recent announcement  the artists reports, that the collection of 35 portraits will be finished by February 2012, as they will be exhibited some day that month somewhere in California, USA.

Currently, art copylefts are weak with respect to code. If I'm a programmer and I want to write code that's specifically for use in libre software, all I have to do is slap the GPL on it and I'm done. If someone uses my code in their program, they either have to GPL their program or I can force them to stop distributing it. Artists don't receive the same protection. If I want to make a piece of art (be it an image, model, sound file, etc) for use in libre software, I'm out of luck. As it stands, all the people using my art have to do is share their modifications to my art and they're free to do whatever they want with the code. There aren't currently any acceptable libre licenses that cover a situation in which a program loads a specific art file. (Mind you, as an artist, it doesn't matter to me if someone loads my file in a proprietary editor, the same way it wouldn't matter to me as a coder if someone loaded my GPLed code into a proprietary t...

999 ammo in Trepidation Trepidation is an open source first person shooter based on the IOQuake3 engine. It was originally conceived on April 9, 2006 with the intent to build a free first person shooter with a sci-fi theme. The idea was initially developed by members of the Star Trek Elite Force gaming community. Yesterday, the first development release since 2007 was released . It's mostly fixes but gameplay is affected. For example the sniper scope is more reactive and missing sounds are now in place. There are 141 MB downloads for 32bit Linux and Windows. For 64bit Linux and other systems there's svn: svn co https://trepidation.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/trepidation trepidation I haven't had the time to figure out whether or not I need Quake 3 or OpenArena for Trepidation to work. Besides the project page there is a blog and a  forum .

Adam Saltsman, developer of the bsd-code, closed-assets, one-button reaction game Canabalt wrote about the effects of  Open-Sourcing Your Game While It's Still Popular  to their game. The results of this decision, though not what we expected, have been very positive. Let's hope the discussion doesn't turn into a hairsplitting war about "free"/"open" and "game"/"engine". :) By the way, I found this news via reddit.com/r/gamedev  in this  comment thread. If you're into reddit as well, feel free to submit and cross-post relevant open source game (dev) news on /r/ opensourcegames !

Olofson's LD22 game Free, open source licenses are underrepresented at game jams and contests. This weekend's Ludum Dare ends in a few hours and it already counts 754 entries. The following authors mentioned open source licenses in the context of the compo/jam: roschdal plans on "releasing the game as open source on Github" Riley Adams 's project is already there  (GPL3) Agon 's code is as well  ("LICENSE: TODO") mcc  released LD code as open source before , maybe it'll happen again? Olofson 's (of Kobo Deluxe fame) failed submission is available (under LGPL) Furyhunter submitted a jME game (Not sure but seems to be GPL) kragniz 's GPL game requires pyglet and pymunk lorancou  made a HTML/Canvas game called lonekitty (GPL) lonekitty Here are some non-submission projects discovered on Ludum Dare: dwrensha released a SDL framework (GPL) KhaoTom mentioned the Spacescape skybox generator A *lot* of other submissions use GitHub but ...

Hale RPG A very fine read is this review of the TBS/RPG Hale. Its first comment was written by the sole developer. Video: Flare 0.15 Flare 0.15 introduces outdoor areas. Translation submissions are welcome now as well. Look for instructions and examples in this post . Freedroid RPG  recently released the second candidate for 0.15. Soon it will be ten years since registration of the freedroid project on SourceFroge.net. Checking on Scourge 2 , another open source RPG title, there has been no development for eight months.

Hello, I am one of the OpenDungeons (OD) developers and I wrote this blog post for FreeGamer. I bet you're all very excited about whats been going on lately, and I can assure you that a lot of stuff have been made for OD. We have new music for you to enjoy while annihilating your foes, we've got new concept art for the Human and Undead faction, a new forge and a completely new tile set. We have also begun working on the AI and a XML specification for creature stats. Music and trailer Recently timong join the forum and asked about some musical tasks to perform. He started working on a main theme for the game and came up with this :) While he was at it he also made a nice trailer for us which you can find in the about page or watch it below: New concept art We have also received some very nice concept art from the OpenGameArt competition for the Undead faction we got art for these creepy characters: Necromancer Bone Golem and for the Human faction we got art for these nob...

Search for Smodrick 1.3.1, a simple ncurses-based game, was recently uploaded to SourceForge. Nearly dead in Search for Smodrick 1.3.1 The gameplay consists of finding an optimal path to get to the next level and avoiding/deflecting enemy androids. Game turns appear to be mixed-real/turn-based No monsters yet in this match of Black Obelisk 0.2 I was reminded of the JavaScript game Black Obelisk by Starinfidel , in which your task is to destroy hidden obelisks while avoiding or luring deadly monsters. Hint: input is via mouse and you start playing by pressing black tiles next to non-black tiles. Both games are single-player puzzles with minimal visuals.

Hard to believe, but after 12 years of community development, the guys from the open-source engine based on Bungie's Marathon trilogy Aleph One have finally released a version called 1.0 ! If you are lazy, you can watch this first part of a long set of "let's play" videos to get run through this FPS classic: Let's play Aleph One (Part 1) But honestly? This thing even runs on your cell phone (unless you have a talking brick like me :p ), so no reason not to play it yourself. Edit: *hust* that was shoddy investigative journalism by me again :( In fact Aleph One does not seem to run on cell phones yet .