Gaming Daily A-Z

So my recent rant resulted in a lively discussion about ARPGs, but sadly not really in any contributions or new contributors for Summoning Wars so far... but maybe that was too much to hope for ;) Anyways, another project I mentioned was just recently updated: Lips of Suna is now available as Version 0.6 ( release notes on our forums ) and this release marks the first official release with OGRE3D as the rendering engine. In my rant I dissed that rendering engine a bit due to the lack of good content creation tools (yes I know, not their focus or intention), but at least here it seems to have been put to a good use. In somewhat unrelated news, there is also a new version of OpenMW , which is continuing at their current fast pace to reimplement that well known RPG. Change-log can be also found in our forums .

I just happened to come across this nice presentation, and I guess a lot of FOSS games could also take this as a valuable advise: Juice it or lose it The "game" they are presenting is playable in your browser by the way, try it here (hit esc for the menu). Oh and believe it or not, source-code is available too ;) So don't forget to JUICE it real good!

images: DNT 0.9 scenes and editor shots Video:  DNTMapEditor - Using skorpio cave tileset [ download ] DccNiTghtmare (DNT) is a 3D single-player RPG "in a satirical post-apocalyptical world", which encourages suggestions to be posted on their forum . Version 0.9 has been released not long ago, which on the gameplay-side appears to mainly bring new models and audio. We have missed quite a few versions here on Free Gamer though. See the changelog for a complete list of versions and features. As you can see in the video above, third party art assets were used. They were originally created for OpenDungeons and shared on OpenGameArt end of March 2012. Project infrastructure includes translations on Launchpad , doxygen code documentation , a wiki with instructions for contributors  and a roadmap (which is lacking the next version though). PS: I'm having lots of fun translating the game right now. Join me in the thread ! Video: DNT 0.9 long gameplay

image: Node Reviver main screen  video: Node Reviver 1.0 Gameplay Video   Game development jams bring many lines of usually dirty code that power often innovative new implementations of various mechanics and rules. Ludum Dare requires source to be visible but neither code nor art has to be freely licensed. I believe that the histories of TuxKart/SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100 and OpenArena show that maintenance can be one of the strengths of the open source game development scene. Having more gamejam-made working prototypes available under "safe"  free licenses  would enable this community to pick up promising projects and slowly build upon them. Anyways, one of the games that has more than proper licensing information and is both free, open source code and art is Node Reviver. A short description: Game mechanics and level designs intersecting with Pac-Man's PipeWalker's. Light neon colors on black background visuals. Bfxr sound effects (with sound sources included, ni...

Building bridges in OpenGOO video: New Physics in OpenGOO You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle , World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed. Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in  Shotgun Debugger ! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general. SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!) Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

Today I got a small rant: So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right? Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got: Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development?  Check! ( Xonotic , RedEclipse and several other with un-free media) Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development? Check! ( 0 A.D. , MegaGlest , Warzone2100 , Spring mods etc.) Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development? Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply. Flight simulators, turn based strategy? Check: Flightgear ! Check: Battle for Wesnoth ! Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight? Hmmm??? Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into deve...

While we are talking about crowd-funded game-dev assets: The Liberated Pixel Cup has almost reached its funding goal, but today is the last day to contribute... so think about the poor captured pixels and donate !

~5% of David's Merceds' sounds will be donated to the public domain At the time of this post, USD 363 353 are missing and 8 days are left for TrackTimeAudio's Mercedes Sound Recording Kickstarter Project  to be crowdfunded. In a recent update , it was announced, that 5 to 10% of the more than 200 resulting sounds will become freely available. Free, open source projects that could profit from this include TORCS , Speed Dreams , Trigger Rally , Stunt Rally , Rigs of Rods and many more. It would be delightful to see if advocates of free content licensing would bring this project to a "funded" state and further with many small contributions. (And remember, this will allow you to comment what your incentive for supporting was :) ).

OpenMW 0.14 has been released [ blog announcement ] half a month ago. I'm a fan of commented video changelogs and highly recommend theirs  (embedded below)! As an experiment, I created an audio-only version [ogg Vorbis, 4m12s, 3M] using youtube-dl, ffmpeg and sox, in case you prefer that over YouTube. video: OpenMW 0.14 Commented Changelog

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars Dust Racing  (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system. Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply. Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

Today is another session of: "Look what I found in my FG spam folder" ;) But this time I am actually adding a lot of nice other stuff to it, so that it is almost a "dev-corner" post! But first things first... the frogatto developers made us aware that there is a new game based on their really nice 2D engine, called Cube Trains : Cube Trains Beta gameplay Note that, just like frogatto, the final version will cost a few pennies, but the engine is totally FOSS and the current Beta is still free to download. This seems to fit to the general idea of the folks behind this engine as they outlined in the email to us: I'm really glad we now have a second major title done in frogatto's engine, because we're gradually trying to position frogatto's engine as an open-source alternative to closed-source packages like GameMaker or RPGMaker;  partly just because development tools are one software category that benefits far more than other categories from being ...

Post-Soviet Adventure's protagonist cleaning up the inventory The story of  GameLV: Adventure Game in Post Soviet Environment  (Post-Soviet Adventure) begins with your dog having gone missing and your only lead being a meat product factory. For about one hour you point-and-click through pre-rendered environments, hunt pixels, read humorous descriptions and dialogues to reach a resolution. I for one appreciate the humor in AGiPSE's humor, which I might have a high affinity to due to do my roots in Russia and my life taking place in eastern Berlin most of its time. Be warned though: references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography and violence are common in this game. Post-Soviet Adventure is available in English and Latvian languages, both text and voice, although the English voices are incomplete. video:  [English Voices] Adventure in Post Soviet Environment (GameLV) by snauts (Artūrs Grebstelis) The engine features savegames and scene animations ...

YAMC? Yet another Minecraft clone??? Well Terasology (previously called "Moving Blocks") sure looks like one: Terasology alpha gameplay But besides looking like a pretty good YAMC, it actually promises to deviate from the boring Minecraft routine and mentions the pretty well liked games Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper as inspirations for its planned game-play :) Code is under the Apache license, however the current pixel textures are non-free. But if this takes off, those should be relatively easy to replace with really free ones ;) Oh and you can run it via Java directly from your browser (I had a black void as a world under Linux though... so your mileage might vary also).