Gaming Daily A-Z

Adonthell's broccoli bushes. James Nash has kept working on vegetation sprites for Adonthell 's art repository (which is quite meager right now.) He is using layers for producing the images. What you don't see is the fact that in the original image I have the outlines and surfaces separated as individual layers so I can easily re-colour them to make variations. Equally I can hide some layers such as the leaves. This way it is much easier to manipulate the images and to create a richer variety of objects. Layered images can be seen as "source" files for flat/"compiled" bitmaps. Great to know that people actually use this editing-friendly layered-images technique for producing game art. Good news for Linux-users! Automatically built binaries of FreeOrion's latest SVN revision are available from psitronic.de/div/FO . They will allow you to play the game without having to build it, which isn't that easy on some distributions. Best thanks to krodd...

New art for Adonthell There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash , an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".) Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions , the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo . Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games si...

Battle Tanks Battle Tanks is, "a funny battle on your desk." . Choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using an arsenal of weapons. Original cartoon-like graphics and cool music, "fun and dynamic," and it has different network modes for deathmatch and cooperative style gameplay. I don't believe it has a single player version, yet. The game is open source and available for Linux (source) and Windows. It's a relatively new game (sf.net project was registered in 2006) so there are still some teething issues it seems. Adonthell , a longstanding open source console RPG engine has seen it's first update in a couple of years - version 0.4.0 alpha 1. The previous version, 0.3.5, is packaged with a small game called Wastes Edge which is one of the few completable open source games with a storyline and is available for every OS known to man. Whilst the new 'development' version doesn't come packaged with a game, it's good ...