Gaming Daily A-Z

Top ten FPS that are FOSS Time for another overweening list - the SEO godesses demand it! Tremulous has 1.1 stable, 1.2 dev and 1.3 third party dev versions. It's a mess. Getting bots to run is a mess. Yet I love this game. I am only capable of playing 50% (can't handle moving aliens at all) yet I had the most fun building bases in Tremulous. So you want to download and play Tremulous? HA! HA I SAY! Pick your poison: 1.1 stable from 2006 1.2 beta from 2009 1.3 inofficial alpha from 2018 I still don't know which is the most useful for either finding servers with bots or humans. ( 1.3 has zombie game mode servers with bots is all I know ). Unvanquished is Tremulous 2.0 and a little more complex and hardware requirements. If you can find a better-looking FOSS game I'm all ears and eyes. Uvq has bots built-in. OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with strictly freely licensed assets, some of which likely satisfy niche fetishes. Who doesn't know OpenArena ? Rexuiz is really i...

Hat tip to forum member TheLastProject who posted about a promotional video for a proof of concept research project called 'IllumiRoom'.  The main game shown is Red Eclipse, but SuperTuxKart also briefly appears (implicitly as the game played by a girl!) around the 0:48-50 mark. I doubt they were actually showing an Xbox as I'm unaware of either Red Eclipse or SuperTuxKart being able to run on one. I find it fascinating that 2 FOSS games would appear this way.  Either this is an indication of red tape avoidance (no permission required for GPL games) or a cultural shift within Microsoft - or perhaps I'm just reading too much into it. It certainly adds some validation to the games themselves, indicating they are impressive enough to feature as part of a video by one of the world's foremost technology companies.  So hats off to the developers of both projects and also the projects that enabled them (CubeSauerbraten, TuxKart) - I like it that both games are good exampl...

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards. Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!                              You can find the sourcecode on Github  here EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox  / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

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...

Scourge 0.21 is out . It's been optimized and stabilized considerably and now has a full 12 chapter storyline. Each release of Scourge gets closer to being a really good game - there are still a few issues that need addressing such as the character models - and that is reflected in the increasing activity of contributors. Until a year or so ago, Scourge development was mainly a 1 man effort, but 4 people put a lot of work into this release. A new model format (they are looking at [the unfortunately named] assimp for 0.22) and some better character models (think Glestimals , some JCRPG models, and a few of their own) and Scourge will offer some real immersion as well as a platform for creating new Free Software 3D isometric RPGs. Talking about optimizations , VDrift is getting back on track after a ground-up rewrite to address key weaknesses in the codebase. Most features are now back and working better than before. I'm going to give the SVN version a go, but the vdrif...

Overgod Overgod , an abstract shooter using Allegro , is a fast paced top down shooter. It's fun although pretty tough, and has a nice retro feel but with good modern graphics. It's one of those games you can pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes, let off some steam, then be back to whatever it was you were doing without having lost too much time. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Macs. :-) Cube Legends (formely known as LOZ:Cube) is a Cube mod, inspired by the Legend of Zela series of games. Since Cube is getting a bit old in the tooth and has been superceeded by Sauerbraten , somebody has stepped up to work on Cube Legends 2007 which will bring this popular Cube mod up-to-date to run on Sauerbraten. FreeTrain has gained another developer, and progress on fixing up the codebase continues. Even better, there is an additional plugin set which contains something like 200+ plugins for FreeTrain, and in the coming weeks it is being translated as well. There'...

I had these grand plans for today, but instead I slept through two alarms and got to work 2 hours late, and forgot what my plans were. *groan* Eat the Whistle ActionCube Anyhow, onto relevant matters, that previously-imminent VDrift release is now official . Go get it, honestly it is a good experience. And it looks great too. :-) I played Eat the Whistle for the first time yesterday. Any attempts to run it on Linux had failed even though it has been ported, but I thought I'd have a crack on my Windows laptop and (despite a few graphical glitches) it worked! It's good fun although whenever the other team had the ball I struggled to locate the player I was in control of. However in terms of gameplay feel, it's quite nice to play and a little reminiscent of Sensible Soccer although more dynamic but not quite as sharp. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, so I'll mention it now... ActionCube looks fun. I might have a bash at it later in the week. Think Count...

Sauerbraten There is an updated release for Sauerbraten . This innovative open source 3D FPS is an evolution of the popular game Cube . For those who don't know, Cube and Sauer are not just FPS games but live map modding tools as well where you can manipulate the game world in real time. The game maps are combinations of deformable cubes giving map creators massive control with minimum complexity. There are already some jaw dropping maps available for Sauer which is adding new eye candy all the time. The developers are designing a roaming action RPG using Sauerbraten engine called Eisenstern . The entire game world will be in one massive level which the player will have to battle around. It seems to be more in a proof-of-concept stage whilst Sauer matures but is definitely one worth looking out for. TA Spring In other news, playing TA Spring just got a whole lot easier for Ubuntu (Dapper) and Debian (Sarge+) users. There's an entire guide to getting it up and running...