Gaming Daily A-Z

Sintel The Game Alpha 0.2 was released years ago but you might have missed it, just as have I. The three levels have the following features: 1. Snow landscape, puzzles, no fights, no ending (I think) 2. Desert landscape, no puzzles, 2 enemy types to fight, no ending (I think) 3. Village/port environment, one puzzle with one variation, 1 enemy type to fight (maybe more), has an ending, possibly has multiple endings (not tested). Gameplay Video As a game alpha, it is OK. As a alpha game made in Blender Game Engine (BGE), it is actually impressive: controls and window behavior feel OK, compared to smaller games I sometimes run into, which often seem to have resolution, mouse control/sensitivity or window manager related issues. And it looks nice. Download the Alpha (1GB) from  https://github.com/jonburesh/sintelgame/releases

While not necessary only for FOSS games, all will be done with the Blender3D included game engine (BGE). Check out their website here and/watch the video below: The overall theme will be announce on the 20th when the contest starts.

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...

While Blender3D is one of the premier FOSS projects out there, its integral part the Blender Game Engine (BGE) is often belittled as not a serious game engine. While the criticism is certainly not completely unfounded   and the integration of limited "non-programming" game code creation (via logic bricks) gives it a bit of a "RPG maker" image, it really is a quite interesting platform to work on it seems. Ok, probably as of now the BGE is really more of a rapid game prototyping engine, but previous experience during the Yo, Frankie! project has actually shown that at least compared to some other well known FOSS engines, it is a serious contender (that Blender Foundation project originally started on Crystal Space , and after many problems was implemented in the BGE in a few weeks only). So what makes it so interesting? Well for one there is the full integration with a creation tool (obviously Blender3D) so that getting your content into the game is only a matter...

We recently featured another air race kind of game , but this on has much more eye-candy: BGE_Airrace ocean demo And believe it or not, but it is made with Blender3d 2.49b's game engine (update to 2.5/2.6 planned at some point)! Another video with a nice terrain you can find here (beware crappy sound) . And an in-game track editor is under development too! You can have a look at the development of it and download some old versions of the .blend over at the Blender artists thread . But don't expect visuals like above, as the awesome Blender artist Martinsh just recently started to overhaul the graphics like that. So where is the catch? Well licensing is a bit unclear... in a recent BlenderNation news posts the main developer stated: "This air-race related project is a non-commercial open -source freeware and source .blend file will be released for common good", but I am not sure in how far this will extend to the new art assets, and a clearer commitment to a Creative...

Dear diary...ermm readers *hust*... this is my first post on this blog so please be gentle with me! I am sort of helping out now and then since qudobup is busy with other stuff. Beeing a forum regular I had to help out of course, even if I might not have the time to post that often. Ok now to the really important stuff: Blender (everyones favorite GPL 3D modeling application) also has a build in game engine. And what would be nicer than having a nice competition for game creation? Here is a video of one of the winners from last year (not open-source!): DukDuk gameplay So why not join in that get a chunk of the $500 prize? Why Blender game engine (BGE)? Wasn't the game engine always the stepchild of the project? Slow, bloated and buggy? Well things change, and with this years open game project Yo Frankie! things have taken a leap towards greatness! Speed has been greatly improved, physics are completely integrated and you can do great eyecandy with the OpenGL 2.0 GLSL shaders...