Gaming Daily A-Z

Yesterday the long awaited version 0.7   1.0 was released and thus after 7 years of development War§ow has gone out of beta. For those out of the loop, here is a short description of it by the developers: Warsow is a fast paced, deathmatch game. It has your classic things like bunny hopping, rocket jumping, and general mayhem. There's many game modes, including, Bomb & Defuse, CTF, Instagib, and the classic 1v1 Duel. You can see the full changelog (including many nice screenshots) here , and if you want to give it a try, head over to their download page . They also made a nice release trailer : For those wondering, there is some discussion here with War§ow developers trying to justify their decision to keep the art assets non-free and why there isn't a open source-code repository. Personally I am not convinced, but at least they release their engine code and promise to keep the overall game always freeware... However besides that, it's a fun FPS! So try some crazy ...

image: lethal battle scene in FLAT FLAT  combines ice skating and shooting in an atmospheric ice scenario. I haven't been able to progress too far but exploring the movement has been interesting alone. If you feel like getting dirty with Allegro 5, there are many enhancement tickets open. video: FLAT gameplay

FLARE has an excellent new website and a series of contributor interviews: Community Spotlight: Justin Nichol Contributor Spotlight: Igor Paliychuk Community Spotlight: Brandon Morris Contributor Spotlight: Thane Brimhall The latest release is 0.16.

The following is a guest post by  Lee Salzman , a contributor to several open source game projects and the lead developer of such projects as the ENet networking library and Sauerbraten, i ntroducing IQM (the Inter-Quake Model format), a simple model format designed to meet the practical challenge of animated content for Quake(-like) 3D engines and allow more sharing of modeling tools across various engines As much as players or fans of various open source FPS games might view all these projects as competing, isolated islands, the surprising and hopeful truth is, we developers actually get together and talk about development challenges a lot. And in past discussions, one of those issues that stuck out like a sore thumb was content, especially animated content such as player models. We were all using our own various custom model formats or cast-off commercial formats (like id's MD5 or Valve's SMD formats) with related third-party export or conversion tools, with varying degrees...

There will be a Lua game programming class for kids and teens in Kansas City by indie game developer Rachel Morris some time in August 2012. LÖVE 2D game engine  and Tiled Map Editor  will be used. Both are open source and run perfectly fine on Linux systems. Rachel is known for  OpenArt  and you can check out  an interview with her  or her  GitHub repositories . video: Beginning Programming guide - Need newbies Feedback on the existing course materials and of course participants  are requested .

The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order... But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60 ; because as you should know... a higher number is always better :p New alien spider bots! Obviously it wasn't just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release. Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan: Open Sourced. Ever Evolving. Which has a certain ring to it ;) Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War§ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice ...

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features. Sintel: The Game , currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release ! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet). Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator. Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog. Frogatto  is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started " making friends " on their blog by talking about projects they like. idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article. Summoning Wars , a 3d-visuals hack'n'slash needs a new lead developer . A discussion  about OpenGameArt 's...

Bananabread is the spiritual successor to Syntensity (which added a Javascript scripting layer to Sauerbraten) only this time running inside the player's browser. It was ported using Emscripten, a C++ (LLVM) to Javascript compiler, and seems to have quite a lot of Sauerbraten's functionality ported over, including bots, multiple weapons, map editing, and even a Javascript api to control camera cutscenes. It currently runs in the development versions of Firefox and Chrome  and seems to get about 1/3rd to 1/4th of native fps. Get the source here:  https://github.com/kripken/BananaBread

Knights , a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements . Tales of Gydia , a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC , was started on SourceForge.net. Unknown Horizons , a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor. Black Dog , an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released . Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s). ctdabomb , an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support. SuperTux , a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics. FLARE , a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested...

The Content Creation Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup is over! You might want to ignore this blog post and read their  announcement  instead. Here is a partial preview of the results: More, not so nice previews: [ part1 , part2 ] 18 minute preview of all .flac files (two .ogg files excluded): Download from box.net [ mp3 , 17M or ogg , 13M] Get all files from  opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries  in .zip format: Download from mediafire.com [ link , 185M], box.net [ part1 , 96M |  part2 , 90M] Now it is time for the Coding Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup! Rules : Start: July 1st, 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time End: July 31st, 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time License:  Code entries must be free and open source, and must be available under the GNU GPL 3.0.  You may optionally release the code under any additional license(s) that you choose. Source code:  You must provide the complete source code for your entry.  Any code you have writte...