Gaming Daily A-Z

This is a guest post by user Hythlodaeus, discussing open source clones, indie game community behavior and developer's apologies. video:  Open Hexagon - Official Release Trailer Vee Software's Open Hexagon is a very, very recent game, but even in its short existence, it has already managed to stir up quite an amount of controversy , the matter being that Open Hexagon is none other than a free software clone of the popular iOS/Android game Super Hexagon , created by the equally popular indie developer Terry Cavanagh . Now, video game clones are not a negative or uncommon thing at all, and have pretty much existed since the beginnings of video game history. However, Open Hexagon developer, Vee , has recently found himself the victim of some serious flak, the reason behind this being that he decided to release his own game clone before the much anticipated PC/Steam version of Super Hexagon. This resulted in a legion of rabid Cavanagh fans rushing in to accuse Vee of being a thief...

Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here . It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games. In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally . Join the discussion here . Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;) One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here . Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D

Some assorted news from the FOSS RTS thematic area. First of all, Megagest saw another somewhat bigger release ( 3.7.x ), and someone also made a nice cinematic for them: Sadly no news on the planned graphical update, as the merger with GAE seems on hold, but the new version adds a lot of nice usability enhancements. Much more active on the graphics front is 0 A.D. on the other hand. In their recent development update #9 they talk about completely switching to their new shader based renderer, and the guy behind these renderer improvements recently gave a short interview too. Some other interesting news include this recent forum posts of some modders trying to switch to the 0 A.D. engine for their modern warfare RTS called Rogue Republic . Asset integration seems to work already as you can see here: Rogue Republic assets in O A.D. The thread over at the 0 A.D. forums has a few additional details, but no significant info on the FOSS status they are aiming at in regards to their medi...

Time remaining to vote SourceForge.net has " Project of the month " to promote communities supporting their favorite projects. December 2012: UFO:AI battles against JStock in the poll for "Project of the month". It's a close race. You know what you have to do.

Busy for a while moving... and the crickets take over FreeGamer it seems *chirp* *chirp* :D Anyways, I am partially back in business, so a warm HELLO from East Africa!!! So nothing much to report right now, except that there is a really nice cinematic trailer available for the FOSS RTS ZeroK (which is based on the Spring engine ): They also released a new version not all that long ago, so give it a try if you haven't so far. Stay tuned, as I struggle to get into my regular FOSS-Games blogging habit again ;)

This is a guest post by user Hythlodaeus, discussing GPLed video game engine reimplementations, and presenting several projects related to the topic. I thought I should take some time to discuss in detail one form of project that has been sometimes featured here, on  FreeGamer , and is generally quite popular in the FLOSS gaming world: engine rebuilds / re-implementations. Rather than being wholly original projects or Intellectual Property-free clones of more popular games, engine rebuilds (also known colloquially as “engine clones”) are essentially an attempt to completely reconstruct and improve upon the features of a given original game, without going trough the trouble or replacing original game art assets and without creating a new whole, free-of-restrictions and copyrights IP. Thus, engine rebuilds merely reproduce the rules, mechanics, and game logic of the original game, while still being dependent on some other form of original data. Thes...