Gaming Daily A-Z

OpenGameArt's texture section just received an update. There now is a category tree and files from texture packs are also available as single nodes (pages/description/downloads). You can see some discussion about the new features on the official announcement 's comments.

Walking in the underground city hub in Arx Libertatis Looking up magic recipes and managing inventory while a vision enhancement is active in Arx Libertatis [ more screens ] Arx Libertatis 1.0 has been released. We already wrote about the engine a month and a half ago but this is the first official, stable release of the GPL-licensed engine for the proprietary first-person cave RPG Arx Fatalis. But being able to play the proprietary game is not the end of the development. There are plans for future milestones, for example a Qt-based modern game editor and support for modern shaders. I look forward to it!

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards. Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!                              You can find the sourcecode on Github  here EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox  / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

Yes...you read right, a board-game on FreeGamer :p Playable completely without the aid of a computer or similar device. But hey... it's a game and libre licensed, so it is not really that OT. So this ominously named "Black Flag Games" collective has recently jumped on the Kickstarter hype and seems to have quite successfully financed their game by it (but you can still donate to the cause). Currently they are at $5,932 of their $3,500 goal with 22 days to go. I noticed it because they already started releasing graphics on OGA under the CC-by-SA license as promised: Personally I am looking forward to this, as I actually proposed something quite similar in my long running " game design brain-fart " thread. Luckily for them I released these ideas into the public domain... otherwise I would be sooo suing their a**es off :p P.S.: viva la revolución... errr I for one welcome our new Kickstarter overlords!

Trigger Rally Online Edition race start on a sand track with green trees and an animated checkpoint ahead. Trigger Rally Online Edition  [ github ] is a WebGL racing game based on the concept of Trigger Rally . It has a more detailed car model than the classical game, however I am not sure about the game data license. It features replays too! The project was created by the lead coder of the original/classical Trigger Rally version. video:  Trigger Rally Online Edition gameplay By the way: if you are interested in helping me to sort out missing license-clear graphics and sounds for the classical Trigger Rally, I created a thread on OpenGameArt for that purpose.

So... you might have followed the lengthy discussion in the comment section of this blog entry of mine from last week... if you didn't don't worry you didn't miss anything important :p However I was corrected in quite a few things (besides all the disagreements), so I though it would be good to post a sort of "counter statement" to clear up some recent mess-ups by me: First of all, the developers from Q2W informed us that in fact most ( but not all ) of their art assets are CC-by-SA or GPL, which is great. They have also released a Linux installer now, so feel free to check it out if you are gaming on this platform (like me). Oh and I have also updated the video to a newer one, in case you didn't notice yet. Also, and I am to be honest quite surprised by this, OverDose does in fact have an open source-code repository since some time now, where you can download the source to the engine and some of the cool in-house tools they have developed. No clearly vis...

I'm excited to announce that OpenGameArt.org is will be teaming up this summer with the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons for a big summer games contest, the Liberated Pixel Cup ! The TL;DR version is that the Liberated Pixel Cup will take place in two phases.  The first phase will be the art phase, in which artists will be asked to submit pixel art that matches an existing body of professional quality art that we're building specifically for the contest.  The second phase will be the programming phase, the object of which will be to create a game using the pre-made assets along with the assets created by contestants during the art phase.  A longer overview (as well as the official rules page) can be found on the website . I've been running OpenGameArt.org for just over three years now, and I'm incredibly excited because this marks the first official recognition we've received from the FSF and the CC.  It's particularly awesome because it'...

We are getting a lot of nice mails from developers lately... not sure yet if I am annoyed by the spam or pleased that I don't have to do any research of my own :p These must be the benefits of real journalists who always get these nice offers from lobbying firms to write fair and balanced articles for them (yeah, I included some social commentary in this blog!). So... what was in my spam folder lately? Stunt-Rally got an version 1.5 release ( changelog here ) which a prominent new feature: multiplayer! Multiplayer test in Stunt-Rally 1.5 You can find a small guide to set up a multiplayer game here . Not sure if player collision is also implemented... it would be cool however ;) In general I really think the physics are too bouncy however... not sure if that hits the nail, but something feels off about them. Also... "LOD popping" trees is soo last century :p

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news! And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2). The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World , which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta , which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet). Edit: Updated to newer video But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well). So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar: AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements : What's new in AlienArena Ya3dag , also released a new version recently and I s...

Today I'd like to talk about how free culture can be (perhaps counter-intuitively) good for the commercial games business.  I'm using Dungeons & Dragons (and its recent and highly successful fork, Pathfinder ) as a concrete example of what I'm talking about, but there's no reason this couldn't also apply to computer games as well. I've been a Dungeons & Dragons geek for 20 years now, pretty much since I was introduced to it my freshman year of high school.  Back in my high school days, D&D was in its second edition and the internet was in its infancy.  Dungeons and Dragons was owned by a litigious beast of a company called TSR, which was well known for sending nastygrams every time someone put up a web page with any fan-created D&D content.  This was particularly ironic, since the whole idea behind Dungeons & Dragons was that they threw some rule books at you and then told you to create your own content with them. In the late 1990s, for a var...

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets. A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread . 219 bytes tron is: <body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload= z=c.getContext('2d'); z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325); setInterval(" 0<x%n &x<n*n &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1) ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++) :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s ",9) ><canvas id=c> Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post , is: A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file A small part of your build chain