Gaming Daily A-Z

So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift ). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before , and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon. However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam: The video is shot with FlightGear , everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here , the system itself is not FlightGear specific though. The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV , which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;) Less resource demanding are infrared LED...

Force: Leashed is a free first person gravity fiddler. To advance, you need to guide rockets to their targets using spherical potential fields. And no, it's not like Portal. That much. Force: Leashed was started as one of the 2012  7DFPS prototypes. It is based on GPL-licensed Darkplaces which for example also powers Xonotic . Force: Leashed is available for free download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows from its website . The art asset license status is unknown. Watch this tweet for further information. Video: Force: Leashed Gameplay

Image: Scavenger in-game credits Scavenger is a simple space exploration game set in a large debris field, created by Fiona Burrows in December 2009. It is polished, very atmospheric and expresses a subtle sense of humor inside item/object names. Scavenger was voted 2nd place in the "overall" category at Ludum Dare 16 (48 hour dev jam). It recently was released in a github repository under MIT license (both code and art!). The code is written in Python and runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Video: Scavenger On her blog, Fiona writes about her development process: Pick a simple idea and roll with it. Never leave an unfinished feature. If anything can be polished then do it - If an animation can be added to something then do it, if a small particle effect can be added here then do it. Don't stress over running out of time. When it doubt, pretend this was the plan all along.

Two games recently started "Kickstarter"-style campaigns on IndieGoGo with part of the offer being "becoming open source": Monster 2 , a JRPG which has been open source for a while but then was closed during a upgrade of game data/content, will be released under the  Give it Your Own License, License  if it reaches its goal of USD 1500,-. Tumblegonk , a yet unreleased simple puzzle game, will be released under GPL if it reaches its goal of USD 850,-. Is this how open source games should receive at least a bit of funding? I wouldn't mind if some old commercial or freeware titles would do such a step (which can't really be repeated for the same project/game). It's not a sustainable principle of course though. There are few alternatives of making money with open source game development that comes to mind: Make the engine open source and the game data freeware but sell it on closed platforms, like Frogatto ( iOS version is for-pay). Port existing open sour...

Small retro-style quick news today, so that you don't hear the crickets here on FreeGamer: There is a new game available for the FOSS classic engine Stratagus (read up on the history of it here ). It is called Aleona's Tales: Looks very familiar, right? Yes Grandpa! You can download it here (only windows builds) and discuss with its creator on the Stratagus forums . Graphics are sadly a mix of various Free and non-Free licenses... but at least you get it for freeeee... video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNRDDzcQNs

UPDATE: Here is a nice video of the ( Note: Alpha ) gameplay: Yesterday (following their monthly release cycle) a new alpha from Unvanqished was released . For those with bad short term memory: Unvanquished is trying to revitalize the RTS/FPS hybrid Tremulous . New Unvanquished human player and weapon model Besides the changes already mentioned previously , they have also replaced some more weapon models and now also have a really nice new webpage! Still lots of things to do... but big thumbs up for the progress so far!

video:  Valyria Tear: Woods, Savepoint and Battle [git2012-09-02] Valyria Tear [ blog , GitHub ] is making stable progress! One new code contributor on GitHub, one new art contributor on OpenGameArt, a stable commit history . If you are looking for a free, open source jRPG and are done with Fall of Imiryn , then this is the place for you to test, develop and contribute! git clone https://github.com/Bertram25/ValyriaTear.git cd ValyriaTear/ cmake . make ./src/valyriatear Valyria Tear is easy to compile with CMake and features about 30 to 60 minutes of gameplay so far.