Gaming Daily A-Z

Maratis' editor Maratis is a simple and visual game development tool designed for artists and developers. Tested on Windows, Mac and iPhone. [ full feature list ] Simple is good and Maratis' Interface is very pleasantly simple. I suspect the same thing (without iOS support) could be achieved by providing a simple blender UI setup and a few instructions. The default Blender interface is quite intimidating for beginners after all. Maratis and Blender demo tour Data Yo Frankie copyright Blender Foundation | apricot.blender.org .

Word War vi 0.24 Word War vi is now downloadable as version 0.24 . I'm having an awfully great time playing it (even if it took me some months to finally get over myself and resolve some dependency problems at first). I especially like how I can use my xbox 360 controller for playing and how it's rumble function is used. Word War vi is the most high-tech retro arcade shooter you can get your hands on right now. One super thing about it is that development and tweaking is being influenced by player criticism a lot. So for posting feedback on the game, use this thread . Daggerwind Scrolls Daggerwind Scrolls is a traditional 1st/3rd person CRPG dungeon crawl game written using C# for Mac OS X. Its a fan based project inspired by 'The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall', Bethesda Softworks 1994. I haven't given it a try (and won't do as long as there are no for-*nix instructions). I now count four bigger The Elder Scrolls-related open source projects: Daggerwind Scrolls an...

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing! Eisenstern Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or...

Well there was some, but let's tidy it up for a bit. These days following Free Software game news is much easier, since we have planet.freegamedev.net . That place is ace but it means that the motivation to post here has dwindled. Still, for addicts, I suggest you tune in to there. I know I do. For instance, if you did, you'd know that there's an updated version of Yo Frankie! (of Apricot project fame) available for download. Funnily enough, the post is no longer up as there was a problem with it (at least there was for me). Still, here is the download URL , and it uses 0launch which I'm afraid to say I really dislike. You can also check out FreeCol 0.8-alpha2 . I like that they are releasing early, releasing often. Future maintainers pay attention! Another project that adopts that practise is Battle for Wesnoth . 1.4.x and 1.5.x updates are out with lots of polish. One wonders how much polish will go into that game before it loses momentum. There was hope t...

Frank and mushroom from Apricot There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine , focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping. Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be. The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space ba ck gr ou nds , which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actua...

WorldTool r3 for Radakan Today I finally gave WorldTool (release 3) a try, which is a map editor for Radakan . To use the tool, one has to download it, extract it and then run java -Djava.library.path=. -jar WorldTool.jar . The tool allows you to create a map and to raise and lower the terrain and paint textures on it via brushes. You can place objects on it, which will automatically be at the correct height relative to the ground. It is fun to play around with (though not for too long, as the art asset is tiny and I don't know how to import additional media and because all I can do is make a map, not walk with a character on it or place items or monsters. - Mind you, the editor is in an early stage.) While using it, I got the thought that if such tools were developed enough to be able to produce content to truly enrich games, their ease of use would attract many potential contributers and could turn a player into a contributor. Even if the advanced features (like creating charac...

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll , then download this .blend file , open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :) Apricot, first demo Edit: An unofficial OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release was posted . Testing it is encouraged, so that the official release can become a great one. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new maps and models. The GearHead 1/2 homepage has been updated a while ago. It now looks pretty pretty and has a sexy RSS feed . The GearHead games are Roguelike titles (which I find not that cool...

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge . Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums ! There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG . The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG. Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available . Video of Slune , made with glc glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap , istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that ma...

Winning a game of NO NO is a fun little puzzle game [ video ]. It is built on top of LÖVE , which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted ! I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed. The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet. The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release. An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht , a TDE -based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it...

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music . The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. Whatever it will turn out to be, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :) Last post I told you about Ardentryst . There's a mute gameplay video , I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it. Bear Factory A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games . l-echo , ...

Apricot The Apricot open game project is going to open their code/media repository . Packagers are needed to help the project: if you know something about packaging and bug tracking/solving write to us ! Apply to: res[-a-t-]crystalspace3d.org OpenFrag 0.5.2 has been released on the project's fifth anniversary. You can get it here and read about the features in this thread . Ardentryst Ardentryst by Jordan Trudgett is a side-scrolling fantasy rpg that focuses on story and character development. It's python-based and I was able to run it just like that! (it's only one level though.) It even has voices!! (well, ok - only in the intro.) BBB box The open movie project Big Buck Bunny (BBB) DVD lay in my mailbox (the real one) today! The movie is what I expected it to be: cute, pretty, shallow, a bit funny. It runs for eight minutes and contains fifteen seconds of grotesque post-credits 'outtake' which some of you might find offensive. O_o BBB - A graphical glitch! I...

I was close to putting some kind of melodramatic title like "the beginning of the end" but it would have been, well, melodrama so opted for something more accurate. The blog is going into cruise control. Less posts, less frequently. Some time in the next week or so the forum RSS feeds will get integrated into the blog and this will basically mean the community gets to post news here and the blog itself will be more article focused. My part in this, other than the actual integration work, will be that any game updates I find I will now post in the Game Announcements section in the forum. People who want to make a fuss about their games can post in the Game Showcase section . Projects that need help can post in the Help Wanted section . All three threads will be the focal point of the blog frontpage. These days there's a lot of activity in the forums and it's a better place to go for info than the blog. Also there's plenty of project-specific news to be foun...

Ok, I've been slacking. I could make excuses (please somebody tell me a cheat so I can complete level 50 of Kobo Deluxe ) but I won't. Another Hero of Allacrost release is up for grabs on their website. This version does bring a few new features to the current tech demo status of the project, but it's a major rewrite of several parts so versions will hopefully be coming thicker and faster in the next few months. I tried it out and it's impressive, although not very expansive yet. If they can keep up the production quality and go on to make a full game, it's going to be an amazing game indeed. Fortress WIP There has been plenty of work on the project that was started here earlier this year - Fortress . Check out the castle components courteousy of our very own povray magician, Rushhour. There'll be a playable tech demo soon so I'll post news of that when it arrives! Sun Dog Resurrection is a project to make a Free Software successor to the classic game...

A while ago I mentioned cspop, a 3D populus clone. Whilst the game itself hasn't yet gotten a website - the author is waiting until it's playable before really marketing it - there has been progress: CSPop Work is still going on on the project, it is quite advanced already, but still some work on ui and some finishes on logic are needed to consider it playable. Anyway I have a couple of EXCLUSIVE screenshots - to be seen nowhere else on the web. (Oh yeah, I make blogging sound more like magazine writing every day!) This is a very exciting looking project and I'm hopeful that it'll be "out there" sooner rather than later. The daring can grab it from SVN . You'll need Crystal Space and CEL too. :-) Speaking of exciting projects linked to Crystal Space, there's more details on Project Apricot following a CS conference last month. Project Apricot is going to be a high profile effort to create an open source game using Blender and Crystal Space...

Sometimes I finish a post feeling apprehensive about being able to find more information to populate the next days ramble on open source gaming matters. However, just earlier I was explaining to a friend the difference between open source games and commercial ones, and realise just why there always is something more to talk about - Free games are not just an end product for a player; they are a process, a community oriented process, with visible progress along the way. There really are so many high quality open source game projects around, it's a joy to see them all evolving. :-) Danger from the Deep Just to emphasise what I mean, Danger from the Deep 0.3.0 just popped up on Freshmeat . This rather awesome project simulating WWII submarine combat gains 4 more U-boats, shader support i.e. eye candy, and better sound support amongst other improvements. It really does look so good. I remember playing some submarine game when I was younger and just loving the immersion, stalking e...