Gaming Daily A-Z

Just came across this cool video and project which aims to implement a Mecha game and SDK on the Quake1 engine ( Darkplaces specifically): You can find more details on their website and the Github repository . Art assets are apparently not available yet due to some non-free placeholders, but I hope this will be changed soon. Also no multiplayer, but that might be possible to fix . Also really cool would be a Occulus Quest VR port via the already available and quite awesome Darkplaces VR port called QuakeQuest . Leave a comment on our forums.

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch ( via the autobuilds ), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps. From the user "Antibody" ( known for his duel commentary videos ) comes this nice video overview of the new features: (please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings) On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread . Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily fo...

There's a new big remake effort a-brewing in the Free Software world, this time for prominent shooter/RPG, System Shock . under the shape of project Citadel . According to project description, the goal is to recreate the original game using the widely known GPLed platform Darkplaces Engine , upgrading the game's graphics to full 3D but keeping game aesthetics close to the origianl game. Added modding capabilities and cooperative multiplayer will also be a part of the project.  Details, however, are somewhat scarce, so far, as development is happening behind closed doors, and creator Josiah Jack just announced the existence of the project itself after months of programming in secret. While the code will certainly be all GPL or GPL-compatible due to Darkplaces licensing requirements, the game appears to rely on original proprietary assets, as well as using its own whose license nature is yet to be disclosed. With a release date planned for the the 23rd of December, System Shock...

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

Today I bring you news of yet another rather low profile Darkplaces engine game (e.g. the same engine that runs Xonotic ), called Dead Morning : As you can see in these other, more game-play oriented videos ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), it seems to be quite heavily influenced by another recent 1st person horror game... The website mentions a fully open-source release at the end of this year, so I am rather intrigued what they will come up by then!

The following is a guest post by  Lee Salzman , a contributor to several open source game projects and the lead developer of such projects as the ENet networking library and Sauerbraten, i ntroducing IQM (the Inter-Quake Model format), a simple model format designed to meet the practical challenge of animated content for Quake(-like) 3D engines and allow more sharing of modeling tools across various engines As much as players or fans of various open source FPS games might view all these projects as competing, isolated islands, the surprising and hopeful truth is, we developers actually get together and talk about development challenges a lot. And in past discussions, one of those issues that stuck out like a sore thumb was content, especially animated content such as player models. We were all using our own various custom model formats or cast-off commercial formats (like id's MD5 or Valve's SMD formats) with related third-party export or conversion tools, with varying degrees...

Short call for help: Awesome looking retro-graphics game is looking for a Darkplaces QC programmer. So far only two screen-shots have been released (and no word on the license of the media): I am loving the style... so here is the other: So if you know your way around Quake's QC scripting language try to get into contact with them :) Otherwise you can still follow the progress of this game over at QuakeOne's forums . Oh and taking about Darkplaces... Xonotic finally implemented client-side networked players in their most recent development release. Meaning that there is now client-side movement prediction and thus less (visually) laggy game-play on slower netspeeds!

Fast games for slow summer news weeks... but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p To start out... yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums , but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users. Noteworthy news related to that (albeit not strictly FOSS related): RedEclipse also got included into Desura now ( Moddb 's indie friendly answer to Steam, even with an upcoming Linux port). To avoid complains in the comments... I mention this here even though it is a closed source game distribution platform, simply because it can be a great way to promote (and maybe even sell?) FOSS games, and if we would finally be able to attract the modding community (which is largely represented on Moddb) to work with FOSS engines instead, it would be win-win for everyone involved. Despite its unfree cont...