Gaming Daily A-Z

Nebula from FreeOrion So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today? On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae . Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds! I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE . You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic! OpenDungeons' map editor OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger 's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome... So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS ! There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Co...

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...

Blob Wars: Blob and Conquer 0.8 just got released, including boss battles. I haven't yet played it but it looks fun and a nice departure from typical FPS styles. I came across BallDroppings the other day. This is less a game and more a toy - although aren't games just a form of toy? Self-described as an emergence game, you draw lines off which balls bounce to create sounds. Imagine cross-breeding a bouncey ball and a music keyboard, this is probably what you would get. Somebody else has started an open source game blog, opensourcegames.blogspot.com . Competition? :P I got one of my less tech-savvy friends playing UFO:AI over Christmas. He only found out it wasn't a commercial game or complete when he "finished" the game and it popped up a message explaining this. So congratulations to the UFO:AI developers! It says something about the quality of a Free game if uneducated players rank it alongside commercial counterparts. Speaking of commercial(ish) game...

What is Mistlands ? It's a graphically impressive 3d open source rpg! At the end of July they released Milestone 5, just over a year since their last release. It's online-only, I think, which is a shame. Single player games just aren't the flavour these days. I feel obliged to mention Gusanos . Thanks to Amos ML for the link and apologies for taking more than a month to post it. Gusanos is a Liero clone for modern operating systems. (Liero requires DOS or DOS emulation.) Whilst the Windows download was easy to get to, I couldn't see an obvious download for non-Windows platforms despite the homepage promise of portability. For those not familiar with the classic Liero, here's some gameplay videos of Gusanos. Think Worms vs Quake. There was an update to Trackballs , making it more fun for younger kids which is good news for me and my 6 year old. For the adventurous, there's a 0.2 pre-release of Battles of Antargis which is coming along nicely. There...