Gaming Daily A-Z

Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed... however that was never officially announced until now: This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools… Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don’t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers. Whats more, the code is available… Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any ...

Hello and welcome to slow summer news time ;) But at least the awesome guys over at Xonotic took their time and wrote up what exciting new additions are on their way to version 0.7 in their latest edition of what they call WoX-Blox #4 . There you can read up up exiting changes to the Railroad tycoon mod they are working on... watch this video... pure exitement: Xonotic's railway simulator ;) Ok I was kidding about the last part... that is actually one among many cool small additions they are working on to make Xonotic an even better game. Not mentioned in the blog yet, are the cool modifications to the Overkill mod and the vehicles tZork is currently working on and which can be tested already on a few servers. Staying with the FPS Topic, it seems like the development of the GPLed Doom3/idtech4 code is finally moving somewhere. However iodoom3 (besides that they got a nice looking website recently) is not the center of development as it was the case with ioquake3 it seems. The D...

Of about 150 entries at the first seven day first person shooter development jam ( 7DFPS ), so far I could identify two prototypes that have clear open source licensing in their code and run. Note that this contest did not require sources to be released, only 19 entries had theirs released at time of writing. Video: 7DFPS Cannonball Z Gameplay Cannonball Z is a game where you shoot zombies with cannonballs. It features randomly generated maps.The source code is in the .zip file. The engine uses a BSD license. My code is GPL and my assets are CC BY-SA. Video:  7DFPS: OxyFPS OxyFPS  is a simple first person shooter with the restriction of being in an oxygen-lacking environment.You are on an airless planet with only a suit, a crossbow and a tank of air.Your objective is to survive as long as you can while the corporate goons that caused this terraforming catastrophe hunt you down. Then there's also  Jedi-Academy--Renaissance , which I haven't been able to compile yet and...

video:  Open Source Tools for Game Development Ryan "Icculus" Gordon talked about open source tools for gamedev last month at Flourish! 2012 and we completely missed that. Enjoy the 1h video, he's a great speaker and I'm sure most of you will enjoy the Direct X bashing. :) Note: the first 2 minutes of the video have bad audio quality. The rest is crisp!

One of the FOSS projects I really hold dear (mainly because they chose to include a few models made by myself :p ) is UFO:AI . For those totally out of the loop: it's a turn based strategy game based on the classic game X-Com utilizing an improved Quake2 engine. Recently they had a new release, version 2.4 , but the changes upcoming are even cooler (new soldier models and a greatly improved GUI): More cool screens of those upcoming changes can be found here and here . And here you can find some more as part of a slightly older, but still interesting interview with the developers. Besides these development news, there seems to have been an informal competition of who can do the nicer Let's Play videos of UFO:AI ;) FrontFox's UFO:AI Let's Play video part1 Click here for Part 2 and Part 3 , or check out this series of Let's Play videos as the alternative: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 (Part 1 starts out with an outdated version though). So if you are hooked now by this aw...

Wizznic! cursor-driven level editor WIP Keyboard, mouse and touchscreens control the prettier-than-ever, polished retro puzzle Wizznic! , which is 100% GPLv3 and available as a GitHub project . Last release (0.9.9): ~six months ago. Last commit: one day ago. A recent progress update post reveals the goals for and the path to 1.0: Before Wizznic 1.0 we will create two completely new themes, each for it's own pack, thus, two completely new packs! That is 40 new puzzles, leaving the mainline puzzle set at 80 puzzles. However, before doing that, we will sit down and play through the entire game, this should allow us to come up with some really evil puzzles for the later levels ;) Anyway, just wanted to say, in this in-browser, Object Oriented, Accelerated, flashy, highres, 3D world, that little pixel pushing Wizznic is not dead! Quoted from " Wizznic work ", 2012-06-05.

The premier FOSS RTS 0 A.D. has recently won ( by an incredible small margin ) the Sourceforge.net project of the month vote and now they have done a cool audio interview: Rich : Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities? Aviv : We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games. Click here for the transkript of the full interview , but if you are to lazy to read you can also listen to it on that page in the original voices of ...

So I guess we are a little late to the show, but you should still have a few hours left to pledge money towards the liberation of all games (and more) done by a guy that goes by the name Bryan Lunduke. Amongst the games is the crazy Linux Tycoon in which you can roll your own OS: And other such niche titles, but there seem to be some good tools in the deal too. IHMO this seems to be rather an experiment, and the guy is promising to refund the money if he doesn't reach the goal of US $4000 by today (Yeah I said we are late, and I have no good excuse as it was posted a few days ago in our forums :-/ ). So far he has gotten a bit more then half of it , so maybe it's still possible to reach the goal. However I guess the time was just a bit too short, and the games offered also a bit too not mainstream for this to really have a chance. Edit: He extended the deadline until Friday, as the goal is almost reached .

This weekend the Liberated Pixel Cup started its art contest, which will run until the 30th of June. You can check out the style guide and the existing assets here (includes a interactive HTML5 demo) . Reasonable prizes for the winners and runner-ups might motivate you to contribute, but judging will be only after the second phase of game prototyping, which ends on July 31st. But even if you don't win, you can be sure that your contributions will be a very valuable part of the resulting FOSS game content pack, so every small addition counts. Good luck!