Gaming Daily A-Z

Ahh, qudobup and Charly are back and posting. Lots of interesting news even for me! So what can I add to this? Well first of all I forgot to mention this awesome TBS in my last post: UFO2000 , which is of course like UFO:AI a clone of a very well known series . And I should have also mentioned Stellar Forces which is a remake of Laser Squad :) Cube2 Engine So as you might have guessed todays topic will be the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, which besides being a mighty fine game on its own, has also spawned some great offspring projects lately. Blood Frontier has been mentioned before and since there have not been any new releases since then I will keep it short and just mention this video review which gives you an idea of the game play. But check it out if you have not done so yet! Platinum Arts Sandbox Plantinum Arts Sandbox has also been mentioned here before, and could be quickly described as a game development platform aimed at kids (and adults), utilizing all the nice in game ed...

Fall of Imiryn r792 Annchienta is an isometric RPG engine. It is being used by the console-style RPG Fall of Imiryn (FoI), created by the same developer. The terrain is kind of 3D while everything else is good old pixel-ish sprites. So how playable is the game? Well, it has NPCs and enemies, it has end bosses and maps and character levels and skills and spells. There is grinding and there are savepoints. Sounds complete? Oh right, story! It has story too. I don't know how much though, still have to find the right spot to catch some fish first... EDIT: Oh, I forgot, I made a video recording of FoI, which you might or might not enjoy. Spoiler: I die. I must admit that because of FoI I will go to bed one hour later than planned. (Is it clear that I'm trying to say that it's interesting enough to waste your time on it? Because I'm tired and not sure my phrase there is 'gettable'. O_o Moving on..) Lavirinto 3D 0.6.2 Lavirinto 3D is now of version 0.6.2 and com...

Ruby Early Monday. Pioneer rays of light touched my face like golden hair. It was then that the second Ruby weekend game programming competition came to an end. The results are not impressive, but much more than I had anticipated. The previous Rubyweekend took place only 1.5 months ago, and the weather motivates to spend time outside the reach of game-creation-suitable input devices. Also my humble opinion is that the topic "opposites" was way too liberal. Many games weren't finished, though are playable to some degree. Two of the submitted games had incorrect-case directories/filenames!!!! /me rages !!!!11!! Well, let's blame the weather, shall we? :D Me and kiba wanted to create a simple rts called Playground Wars and we failed. No problem, lesson learned (don't try to make an rts in little time.) No regrets but if I'm to participate in a game creation compo this summer again, I will work for it at night so I can sleep in the sun at daytime! I like Opposite...

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world. Blood Frontier , the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release. Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think). There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, thi...

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....

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year. I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too. Simutrans 128 Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com . And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can ...

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful. Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-) Blood Frontier Blood Frontier , a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine , has seen it's first alpha release become available for download . As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change. I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community...