Gaming Daily A-Z

The amazing libre 3D modeling tool Blender needs no introductions at this point. Suffice to say that what began as a humble Free Software alternative to most heavy-duty proprietary 3D software is slowly becoming a new industry standard. The newly released version 2.80 is a testimonial of this. The new release adds not only a much needed upgrade to the UI, but along comes an improved real time renderer and much more. All new features and improvements can be checked here . Finally, some of you might have already heard in the past few weeks the gaming industry titans Epic Games and Ubisoft have officially began sponsoring the Blender foundation with grant funds. These are welcoming news since it means Blender will only see better and more regular updates from increased sources of income. Even if the money comes from proprietary software business, libre developers alike can also reap the benefits. Blender can be downloaded for free on its official download page . Code license: GPLv2 Via...

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

The first flipper pinball machine was released 68 years and 1 month ago and yet there is only a handful of open source, cross-platform pinball video games available! Oh well, let's take them for a spin, shall we? UPDATE  Dec 1st, 2015: 1. Added  Libre Pinball , see  Honorable Mentions  below. 2. Added conclusion section. UPDATE  Jul 17th, 2016: Updated Emilia Pinball links Nexus Pinball Nova Pinball Gameplay Started only a month ago, Nova Pinball 's simple sole 2D table is a lot of fun and development has made good progress. Emilia Pinball Emilia Pinball Gameplay on Five Tables The ancient 3D Emilia Pinball project has a recent fork on GitHub  that adds more tables (the last official release had only 2, the new one has 5). The code is the ancient but consistent original SourceForge project and some new tables are flowing around patches/mailing list posts  https://sf.net/p/pinball/ The game has 4 perspectives (F5-F8) The models are very low-p...

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.

UPDATE: First set of files has been released (license CC0) and on my advise he added some stretch goals: 600$ > 3 game ready Enemies! (models, sfx, animations, effects) 650$ > Dynamic optimized lighting system! (rich dynamic lighting with low resource usage ) 750$ > 4 new weapons!(model, texture, sound) 850$ > Triple the amount of the actual props! (interactive objects,explosibles, new walls, doors windows etc.) 900$ > New player model (model, textures) Currently it is standing at 530$ and there are 22 days to go, so chances are we will see some more nice stuff out of this. ------------ Way too many closed-source game projects never see the light of the day, and their code and assets are forever lost. Now at least one developer thought he could at least make a few bucks by liberating this content under the CC0 license: There is some seriously nice stuff in that pack, and the 500 US $ he is asking for on his indigogo page is a bargain for it. At the time of writing thi...

Google's Summer of Code , is an annual sponsorship of programmers to improve selected open-source programs (or games :D ). This year, quite a few interesting FOSS game projects got accepted (again) and one being our very own friends of the SuperTuxKart project. Read more about their role as a mentoring organization here . So how about applying as a participant yourself and helping out this great FOSS game? You can also browse other accepted mentoring projects here , if SuperTuxKart isn't your thing. Other notable FOSS game (engine) projects accepted are: Battle for Wesnoth WorldForge (Hosting also Ryzom Core & CEGUI) Crystal Space OGRE3D Blender 3D Nice summer of coding ahead :)

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...

Building bridges in OpenGOO video: New Physics in OpenGOO You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle , World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed. Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in  Shotgun Debugger ! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general. SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!) Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

Matt Raykowski , aka sfb, is a community herder for the Ryzom Core project and Summer of Code mentor. Some people may not be familiar with Google's Summer of Code. Annually Google hosts two programs: Summer of Code and Code In. Google Code In (aka GCI) is a contest for 13-18 year olds to engage them in open source that features a variety of tasks and projects for them to complete for points. Google Summer of Code (aka SoC or GSoC) is a program to encourage college students to participate in open source development. It is a 3 month long project that pays USD$2500 per evaluation period - there is a mid-term and final evaluation. You can find a detailed timeline on their site and a complete list of organizations . The student application period begins on March 26th, 2012 and ends on April 6th, 2012. The actual programming portion of the project is between May 21st, 2012 and August 20th, 2012. In years past Google hasn't given a lot of love to open source games in its Summer of ...

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...

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 .

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL . The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license .  Here's an explanation  by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository. Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say: "we have every legal right to market and sell the software" "the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge." Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down. The implication, according to Wolfire: "While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it i...

Long time no see! Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet . That is all ;). Games CONS CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog . I know I do. Xenowar Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet. skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar . Contests SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec) Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [ Rules ] Assets OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more an...

Weaver Weaver [ introduction ] is an objective-based ("invade checkpoints") team fps with a simple gesture sequence spell casting system . It uses the XreaL engine and is currently in an early development stage. Maps are under construction and a few spells are in place. Code is GPL-licensed, "Media will aim to use Creative Commons licenses." Weaver concept art Weaver's current spellcasting interface (Goethe's color wheel [ 1 ] ;) ) The level work I was able to witness is impressive. TRaK is the designer, which explains it. Strolling in bow_block of Weaver - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh5NQ1iT3Gg Weaver's introduction includes a simple game design document. Compilation instructions are located here , communication happens over forum and IRC . OpenArena 0.8.5 OpenArena has a new website look and a new patch release. It provides new or improved weapon effects, player skins, menu UI ( video , compare to old ), icons... OA 0.8.1 icons OA 0.8.5 icons ....

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...

Here is some commercial free software gaming news, which I partially failed to deliver on time. Paul's Music Liberation Experiment is a product of jClassicRPG's lead developer following his passion for composing music. He releases music tracks under the gratis but non-free BY-SA-NC license and visitors can donate to specific tracks, which in return will be released under the free BY-SA license . The money earned from this will be covered to cover Paul's expensive music software purchases and hopefully a proof that at least small bucks can be made with freely licensed media. It's called " experiment " after all. :) I am a big fan of this project! I detest the non-free Creative Commons licenses, but this method is perfect to illustrate just how many people think that being free is more important for media rather than just being gratis. Tremulous T-Shirt Logo Ministry of Frag (MoFrag) sells a Tremulous T-Shirt and 25% go to the Tremulous team. That's the ...

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...

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...

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 , ...

Freeciv 2.1 beta3 is ready ( changelog summary ). I'm on holiday in Vietnam at the moment so won't be able to play it for a few weeks., but I'm sure it's a good release. Also yesterday Blender 2.43 was released with a very impressive list of new features . Now FOSS game developers no longer have an excuse to have rubbish art in their games. ;-) Anyway, back to my holiday, Ciao!