Gaming Daily A-Z

Yes, it looks like the developers behind the long running idTech2 based AlienArena are going make a more slower paced & 'tactical' spin-off and try to sell it. As before the engine will stay open-source (GPLv2), but the assets for the spin-off will stop being free-as-in-beer. Here is the official launch-trailer of the new update and the alpha demo: Beside the new game-play mode, they have also finally updated the menu, and the new version of it is rather spiffy. You can see it in action and more of the regular game-play in this recently uploaded random YouTube vid ( warning: goofy British accents and profanity ). GamingOnLinux also recently had a small preview-article . Last but not least (while we are on the topic of idTech2 based games), a small game-developer's advertisement of a new project currently unfolding in our forums . If you know your way around Quake(2) based engines and/or pixelish art, please join the effort ;)

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour ): You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances. Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt. Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart. At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot... Source-code is available here for those that wonder... *stalkes slowly away* But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly: Unvanquished Alpha 19 -BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound l...

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

First off as a rather fast follow up on the last post: New version of Alien Arena out , boasting a 300% increase in render speed Small, bugfix release of War§ow out now Otherwise, as previously mentioned, Garage Games has now also released their 2D game framework under the MIT license: Their 3D game engine also saw some nice updates lately, however sadly their crowd funding push to port Torque3D to Linux fell (not totally unsurprisingly) short of their 30,000$ mark (with about 10,000$ pledged).

Looks like we will get some nice x-mas presents this year: A bit delayed but probably right on time for the Mayan end of the world, we will see a long awaited new release of Cube2:Sauerbraten . Read about the release announcement here . Hmm, I wonder if it has already Occulus Rift support... Also on the FPS front, AlienArena is having a major engine update, with a claimed massive 3-4 times speed increase in BSP rendering and more VBO improvements. Mars meets CounterStrike? Furthermore they announce a new game-mode to be added soon, which tries to slow down the game-play of AlienArena a bit and add a more tactical appeal. Sounds a bit like selling out to the CounterStrike/ModernWarefare crowd to me, but lets see how it will play ;) Last but not least, GarageGames has announced that after the recent FOSS licensed release of their 3D engine Torque3D (see latest updates here , sadly no working Linux port yet), they will also open-source their 2D engine ! And in fact it will not only be a...

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 ...

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news! And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2). The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World , which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta , which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet). Edit: Updated to newer video But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well). So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar: AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements : What's new in AlienArena Ya3dag , also released a new version recently and I s...

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates: Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;) Another new release ( 7.53 ) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings. Alien Arena 7.53 Quick rundown of other news: War§ow got a new website , and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine ( OpenWolf ) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here ( and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more ).

Found this nice abstract shooter over at LGDB a few days ago: Garden of coloured lights gameplay As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*). In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called " Free Game Alliance " to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here ... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this! Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages... Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena , which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here .

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ). So FPS news only from me today ;) Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week. Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above. Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums. More cool WIP screens can be seen here . Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently. Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project. So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

As the self proclaimed FPS expert here on FreeGamer (who doesn't have a PC to play any FPS right now :( ), I have to keep you updated on the newest released and developments of course! So what is the big news for this weekend? Well looks like the Cube2 engine powered Red Eclipse is finally getting an official release tomorrow :) Red Eclipse release teaser Head over to their IRC chat to not miss the release, which is expected for Sunday 13th of March, 2am GTM! Oh and they are also having a small donation drive to fund their new player-model which will be released as all art assets of the game under a FOSS compatible creative commons license (170 Australian $ still needed at this time) AFAIK. Alien Arena 7.51 released A smaller release comes from the Alien Arena team today . Not much changes in version 7.51 in regards to gameplay or media, but under the hood the engine got some serious performance upgrade ( full change log ). Enemy Territory Xreal development picked up again To m...

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors . Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here . They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :) ZeroBallistics 2.0 So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game !!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here . War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011 Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will mak...

We need contributors, contributors, contributors to misquote a famous internet meme ;) So if you want to be a new author writing wacky (or wicked) articles here on FreeGamer, contact us! Don't let this Blog die! And hey it's a good excuse to be lazy and not work on actual open-source games :D FOSS game news So what kind of gaming related news have piled up in my list during the last month (yes it has been nearly a month since goat's post :( )? Freeroid recently got a major update, bringing it up to version 0.14 . Another major update was given to us by the great Hedgewars team, so who needs worms if he can have hedgehogs? They also make better splashes under my car...*hust*. Forget what I just said, FreeGamer minion! Concentrate on the news I bring regarding the the FOSS MMORPG Ryzom . You might remember that this game has gone free as in freedom (but not as in beer) some time ago, and besides various improvements , it now resulted in a working Linux client . So go and t...

Hello again from the dark side of the moon (at least it's equally remote ;) ). Today I have some assorted news of projects previously featured and one new one. Lets start with the latter: ArcanumAlive or OpenArcanum is a engine re-implemention and assets replacement project for the game Arcanum . It somewhat recently also got a Linux port , and seems to be progressing nicely so far/ again . ArcanumAlive Some RTS news Totally unrelated, the previously featured MegaGlest has been updated to version 3.3.7 which brings a series of nice improvements to the game (including a MacOSX port). Some time ago a much improved version of the WW2 themed RTS Spring1944 was released, and the engine it is based on also got a bunch of updates lately. Finally some FPS news For the readers with a short attention span, I left the FPS news for the very last (so that they don't read it :p). Recently Irritant the creator of AlienArena released some news about the upcoming version, called 2011. The...

Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking... and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games! For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome ;) Further more the UFO:AI team is making some great progress after their highly acclaimed 2.3 release two months ago. Besides a a lot smaller changes, various new sounds have been added since then and the rockets got a nice new explosion effect: Kaaaboom! Oh and maybe this is of interest for some of you (personally I never really understood the need for it though): War§ow can now be played in a browser window via a Firefox plugin! Check out their development blog for more details. Yet another 3D adventure game A rather interesting Project I was unaware of until recently is Ya3Dag . It has quite a lot of rather unique features not found in any of the other Qua...

Lets start with the big news for today :) A new version of Cube2:Sauerbraten was released today: Justice Edition ! Changes include two new player-models, 30 new maps, a mini radar and the new hold and efficiency game modes. For a full change log click here . The blue base! The new game mode "efficiency" gives you a set amount of ammunition and all weapons, and you can only "reload" when re-spawning and in the "hold" mode you get points when holding the flag for 30 seconds for your team Upcoming changes in AlienArena In this other open-source online arena FPS (sadly also with un-free media) some major changes in the rendering engine have been announced recently. Version 7.45 will include the new IQM skeletal animation format, which speeds up and increases the rendering quality tremendously on all somewhat new GPUs! Furthermore changes to the shadowing code have been made: Improved self shadowing Edit (07/29/2010): 7.45 was released today, get it here . ...

FreeOrion star map detail Cheer, for a new release of the awesomely pretty FreeOrion has seen the light! This time both Windows and GNU/Linux builds are provided . Here are the features: New and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.) Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape Reworked drag-and-drop design screen New ship parts Python AI interface improvements Minor UI improvements Bug fixes Check out the Roadmap to see what to expect from future releases! FreeOrion icon art OpenGL will be required in coming versions (currently it's semi-required). While I know that there are people who have old machines and countries where it's non-trivial to get reasonably fast hardware, I can't say that I blame anyone for using hardware acceleration and even making it a requirement. I think it's rather the job of Libraries to allow programming games which make use of OpenGL and will automatically disable effects and use software rendering when no acceleration is...

Hot on the heels of the rather amazing Nexuiz 2.4 release is this years main release of Alien Arena . Alien Arena 2008, or Alien Arena 7.0, or Alien Arena 2008 7.0, however you term it, brings a lot of improvements and new features to a game quickly gaining popularity. Alien Arena 2008 also offers a change to it's overall theme, moving towards a slightler darker, more serious tone, while still retaining a good bit of it's retro style, creating an interesting marriage between classic and modern sci-fi. This resulted in completely new player models, many new weapon models and textures, and seventeen, yes, seventeen new levels! The transformation is nothing short of remarkable. There are major improvements in weapon effects, per-pixel lighting, texture resolution, and resource usage, as well as the addition of a cross platform server browser, FUSE. Weapons have been tweaked for better balance, and movement has been enhanced with the addition of dodging abilities. Alien Aren...