Gaming Daily A-Z

The great thing about open source is a project can never become extinct - there is always a chance of it being brought back to life either by the original authors who re-find their motivation, by new contributors who see the potential, or a mixture of both. Here are the top 10 games, complete with cliches, I'd like to see return to the development scene and back on the road to completion. 1. Bloodmasters home • project This gorgeous 3D top-down action game was released as open source last year after indie developer Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden found he'd lost motivation to continue with the project. It's a complete game with great graphics and needs a good C# developer to pick it up, port it to Mono, and help restore the community . 2. Project Citadel home • project A very nice looking turn based strategy game set in World War II. The game reached a playable state before it's development team ByteWare stopped playing the development game. 3. Windstille home...

Unnamed Game This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid". Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum . Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?...

SuperTuxKart 0.4rc1 has been released. It replaces the physics engine with bullet for collisions, and subsequently is far more fun to play. Some track improvements, a new character, better AI, music, and other features. I'll be honest, I thought 0.3 was unplayable because of the terrible collisions. I had a quick go of 0.4rc1 and it's much more fun. I still think the tracks are generally lacking but the game being more fun should encourage more contributors so hopefully we'll see some good tracks contributed this year. If you love MarioKart or just love SuperTuxKart, and have some good ideas for tracks, sketch them down and contact the STK team who are very receptive. Also they are looking for original gameplay ideas to give STK it's own identity, so contribute those too if you have any. FreeTrain Bloodmasters There's been a major development with the FreeTrain project . For those who don't remember, I ran a campaign asking for help translating FreeTrai...

Lots of activity amongst the FreeGameDev crowd. Qubodup has created an amazing new forum skin , so participating in the forums has never been a more pleasant experience than it is now, and he's still tweaking away. A new feature, Wikiwatch , a sort of planet for wikis, was added. Now I just need to improve the blog (include announcements rss, update links, generally nicer layout) and FreeGameDev is go. 5.... 4.... 3... etc. ;-) In terms of game news, it's gone a bit quiet, fortunately for me. Glest with shadows Bloodmasters Glest got shadows. Purty. :-) The OpenClou! team have put up their first model concepts, as seen on the Sourceforge project . Lovely! Bloodmasters will soon be open source. It's a 3D top-down arcade shooter with plenty of blood. Will report on it more when it is. Yay for me . :-D I wanted to put a screenshot up but Blogger is being lame... will put it up later. Edit: Done! Bridge Builder 2006 is now available for Linux from here . It'...