0 A.D. and Megaglest updates

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:

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RubyWeekend, but also PyDay

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Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [ video ], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [ video ], satoshi's console-based footracer [ video ], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [ video ], ippa's Zombie Horde [ video ], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [ video ] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught . The submitted code had to be released under an OSI -approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame , which is a SDL -based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu . Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare ,...
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Hex Tower Defence and Java vector tools

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HexTD close view Hex Tower Defence is a Java-powered tower defense game inspired by the unfree, flash-based VectorTD . You can play it inside the browser or grab hold of the code and install/compile it with the help of these instructions . Gazelle desktop HexTD uses the SVG Salamander Java vector library. It's author is Mark McKay , who is also working on an animation suite, which supports Scalable Vector Graphics: Gazelle . Gazelle is a movie editor that makes it easy for you to create short keyframed animations on your computer. There are some tutorial videos available. I look forward to playing around with Gazelle, as I'm very interested in using SVGs to create (animated) game media or to even use them directly in games. HexTD gameplay (likely to be found boring ;) - also there's no sound by default)
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LordsAWar! 0.1.3, OpenArena 0.8.1, Commander Stalin 0.9.3

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LordsAWar! 0.1.3 LordsAWar! reached an (unstable) 0.1.3 release . After installing some game-uncommon libraries and compiling for half an hour, I expected to move some units around for some turns and stop playing from being bored. But actually, I enjoyed the simple game rules. LordsAWar! has decent graphics and good music. I like very much that the game cares about the player by providing a 'restore crashed game' button. The game did crash once, but think I shouldn't have started it together with an other app from the same command line and then moved the game window while it was generating a level... :) Actually LordsAWar! makes a stable impression. The only thing that confused me in some situations is the path finding. Units would walk in a zig-zag pattern instead of straight lines. I think this might be because vertical/horizontal and diagonal movement is equally expensive and that the behavior is not a bug. LordsAWar! 0.1.3 [ direct download ] After the absence of an o...
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