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...

Shaders seem all the rage these days. Now Thunder n Lightening has support for them too just days after Danger from the Deep implemented shader support. Wavey reflecty shiney water. I smell pretty FOSS games! :-) Boson Actually the first FOSS game I remember getting such fancy effects was Boson . A 3D RTS, the codebase suffers from KDE dependencies which limit portability somewhat as well as making it a pain to install on Linux systems without KDE. Given how cool it looks, I'm sure they'd be much further on as a community if it was easier to install on non-KDE systems. I'm sure they would get much more developer interest if the game were available for Windows and Mac OS X and available in a format other than tarball for Linux . Somebody just pointed me in the direction of Qonk , a space strategy game. It's in the early stages of development but has a much smaller scope than typical space strategy projects like FreeOrion , so is already very playable. Games onl...

I don't know how this game isn't more well known, but I only just found out about XEvil . This game is a cross between Commander Keen and Quake and it's very fun, if a little dated. Action packed and chaotic, it's all about extreme violence platform-style. Be warned, this game contains lots of violence and lots of adult language so really is not one for your kids should you have any. I'm keeping an eye out for the next release of Privateer Remake or Privateer Gemini Gold . In the latter they are busy taking the rather garish low-res base and npc graphics and overhauling them , so the next release should be much more pleasing on the eye. When I downloaded PGG, I found the low-res bases too much of a clash with the gorgeous 3D space flight and it put me off considerably. There's also a new release of Battle for Wesnoth around the corner. The amount of people contributing to this game is phenomenal and as such version 1.2 will look absolutely gorgeous. The...

OTRS Well, look what we have here. Joining the likes of Boson , Glest , and TA:Spring / TA3D is another Free 3D RTS game: ORTS . The interesting thing about ORTS is the motivation - the AI. ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games. <snip> ...the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines. <snip> ... the ORTS project [is] a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games. <snip> Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge the...