Gaming Daily A-Z

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...

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him. FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely. Sauer NYC Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style. Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is....

Just a tiny snack this time! One of the Christmas presents this year was Battle Tanks Xmas Edition . It introduces more interactivity (very GTA-like stuff) and a lot of fixes. No kidding, this is the biggest update we've ever done to our little game. Sounds promising. Warzone 2100 2.0.10 Warzone 2100 2.0.10 was released shortly before 2008. It fixes ATI 3D graphics and Vorbis 1.2 sound support and should make the game fully playable for some who were not able to run it with sound or at reasonable frame rates. Also terrain rendering is supposed to be faster and produce prettier results. The ex-commercial project is for me the best free strategy game available. It was GPL-ed, excluding videos and music and I hope that it will soon feature some cool tracks to make the click-action even more pleasant. Stormbaan Coureur 2.0.2 is available for linux systems . It features a new model, which I think is sexy, although I don't understand how the rear axis is physically possible (you...

Time flies when you're forgetting to do things, like update this blog. Damn, I make a post, have a nap, get distracted, and 6 days later I remember I was supposed to be posting again. I have umpteen drafts of half-finished opinions; games get released and I don't know about it. I need to invent an army of workers that will mine the web and report for me. The Free Gamer forums got a facelift thanks to Qudobup, the guy also behind the look for Free Gamer. It looks really cool and since the forum supports RSS you'll see a few forum-related things going into this site in the nearish future. Scourge 0.19 got released! Yay! No changelog on the site? Boo. Seems like binaries will eventually be available for all major platforms and will appear on Sourceforge . Despite the lack of information about this release on the site, having monitored Scourge development for a while, I can say 0.19 contains some really cool new features - outdoor environments and more storyline - an...

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 ...