Gaming Daily A-Z

Octower! BAM! Word War Vi runs on Pandora ! (Have a feed !) Split-screen! BAM! Egoboo alive, kicking and now has a pretty website! Lazza made a feed ! Code! BAM! jClassicRPG development continues !

Zero-K: Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :) It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back IrrRPG Builder IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua. There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functi...

Has it really been that long since the last post here? I'd better contribute before tumble weed hits the front page. Egoboo 2.8.0 has been released ( download + changelog ). The Egoboo team stress this is an unstable release, that it hasn't yet seen the kind of testing they would like it to have, but it is "biggest release Egoboo has ever had" so it is good news for the project. Which got me thinking of the successor to Egoboo, SoulFu . Now, this project has had a rocky history. The author released it as "niceware" (some silly 'you agree to be nice to dogs' license) to prevent forks, but that just meant nobody really got involved. Amazed at the lack of help, along with some criticisms he didn't approve of, he threw his arms up and left the project in a huff. Some years passed by. Keen people started to get involved (screenshots!) and it seems it is moving again, albeit hampered by the loss of a domain name and forced to move to a new (crap...

*Qubodup's eyes shift left and right* Qubodup mutters, "I smell death." *Charlie jumps out from behind a tree* "No! It's me!" Or maybe Q meant death by a thousand of Charlie's bad jokes? I got jokes, man. Ok, ok... games stuff. Enough inane joke stuff. Games... FreeOrion 0.3.14 came out with a fairly mega changelog . A preview of the 3d space combat is in there, as well as lots of fixing and balancing and content enhancing. It's becoming a very deep game and once the 3d combat is done it'll be one of the stand out open source games you can play, and only getting better. Hats off to the developers for their dedication to realising their dreams, it's been a long haul. Here be a video: FreeCol 0.9.3 just came out . Fixes ahoy! Good game, that, although I still don't understand how to play it. One day I'll swallow my pride and ask how the hell you assign hammers and build things. Danger from the Deep 0.4 preview release for ...

Clonk Clonk got open sourced! Welcome OpenClonk . Clonky! It seems to be the indie game fashion at the moment what with 0AD and all. What is Clonk? Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactic-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms. So, the Clonk developers open sourced it , but since backwards compatability is a big problem for them, they ditched all Clonk content and are asking the community to contribute new game content. Judging by the forum, the community looks very active, it's a case of 'watch this space' I guess. The above video is the "Clonk Rage" trailer. I got the impression this is what has been open sourced although I'm not sure how of the levels/content came with it, if at all. Perhaps somebody could check out the source and see where it is up to? Anyhoo... so, Ceil... round up... get it? Despite the lack of Free Gamer activity, the FOSS game scene is as active as ever. Some new releases that should have been m...

Update: brain malfunction. I first posted 2.7.0, then 2.7.7b, but the correct _stable_ version of Egoboo is 2.7.0b and the development version is 2.7.7, got it? =/ Thanks for the pointer, maststef A new stable Egoboo 2.7.0 2.7.7b 2.7.0 wraps up several months of development and bug fixing. This project has really come back to life over the course of 2008. It is very well tested with a lengthy changelog . If I had make a criticism, it would be that Egoboo really looks dated these days and perhaps they could renew focus on nicer textures and more detailed models - perhaps aspiring to be a bit closer to SoulFu in quality - but graphics do not a good game make. It's great to see the project successfully revived from a lifeless piece of bitrot that it had become a few years go. Now it's a pretty smooth looking experience. Check out this (slightly rambly) video review: Unknown Horizons 2009.1 was released several days ago. It now resembles a game, you can build a city, ...

OpenTTD OpenGFX OpenTTD moved a step closer to being a Free Software game with alpha releases of OpenGFX , the "[8bpp] Graphics Replacement Project". There's still a few black boxes ("features") where yet-to-be-replaced buildings should be, but it looks fairly good other than that. OpenTTD 32bit extra zoom Of course, this is just the low-resolution replacement that makes OpenTTD fully free, and is not to be confused with the high-resolution graphics work (see screenshot). The more detailed graphics are [unsurprisingly] less further along. In the meantime, there is a totally Free Software transport game in Simutrans . Simutrans Pak96 Comic Pak96 Comic [for Simutrans] looks especially gorgeous. Clean, clear, and consistent graphics mean you can focus on gameplay rather than get distracted by artifacts or areas that are difficult to visually parse. The simplistic style has meant they have been able to rapidly create a large number of graphics with minimal de...

Egoboo 2.6.1 (stable) is ready for consumption (go there for download links). Go kick some ego ass with this revived classic. For braver souls there's also the development version but the Linux effort lags a bit behind the Windows effort with that one. There's also a great overview of the upcoming Scourge 0.20 release. The features for version 0.21 sound very promising. Scourge is very close to having enough features and contributors to make it a very, very nice game and if support for the Worldforge model format gets done, I can see some nice new models making it into the game and it finally getting some credit. Here's pictures of Project Football , an exciting project to create a soccer management game. The site is mostly in Spanish though the author posted a thread in the FGD forum. Finally, the author Stormbaan Coureur of has posted the following request for pledges towards a game he has been creating that fully simulates a tank with tracks. If he gets en...

Goonies F1 Spirit Road Fighter Daimonin A good open source platform game that never gets a mention is The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition . This game is a remake of the classic NES / Master System version by Konami. The same team is also responsible two rather fun arcade top-down racing games, F1 Spirit and Road Fighter , which are also remakes. I'm not sure what the source license is for these (ack, there goes my Free Software credibility) but you can get the source and the games compile / run on the 3 major platforms (y'know, Lin/Win/Mac). There's not-so-recent updates to Daimonin , the 2D isometric fantasy MMORPG that seems to play second fiddle to the likes of Eternal Lands and Planeshift due to it not coming with the fancy 3D 3Dness. I mean, everybody wants 3D, and those who don't play nethack. So there's no room for anything else. Especially not something as addictive as Daimonin. I'm not going near that game again, I barely escaped the first t...

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 ...

No, it's not another diabolical sequel... it's the number of days since the last major Freeciv release until yesterday when Freeciv 2.1 went gold. People round on Freeciv for being unoriginal, but for me it fixes most of the problems with one of the greatest game franchises ever and is, well, Free Software. So for me Freeciv is everything that's great about Free gaming too! :-) Hi-res graphics (well, relative to Civ2/Freeciv2.0) and a new SDL interface that got last minute save/load support *cheer* , better AI, and a lot of gameplay balancing - just some of the many features that went into this release. It's been worth waiting for and my brother has promised me a game once we acheive some work milestones! Multiplayer Civ is a lot of fun and very involving (who needs FPS games?) but importantly the Freeciv team place high value on the single player edition so it caters to the casual gamer as well as the intense one. I came across another open source 3D flight simula...

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...

The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre - the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists - that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge , JCRPG , Xarvh , 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there. Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIF...

Pingus 0.7.0 is available for download. With revival work complete, Pingus now uses SDL and comes with lovel anti-aliased fonts. There's no new levels yet but with development seemingly back on track hopefully the level editor will return and some good levelsets will get contributed. It has a lot of potential as a game because the Lemmings series kinda, well, was more fun when it was 2D. If enough level makers could get together, I'd love to see a release inspired by "Oh no! More Lemmings" which was my favourite of the series and also incredibly challenging. Another game with a major update is Egoboo Resurrection . There is a new fully working music system and major graphic enchancements - antialasing, shading, dithering and prespective correction all supported. (A long list of buzz words there.) Most importantly the lead developer Zefz is trying to get the game in SVN so others can contribute more easily and, speaking of contributions, somebody is already h...

There's a new Bos Wars release - version 2.4 comes with a new resource system and a new tutorial (presumably to reflect the new resource system). These days Bos Wars is the flagship game using Stratagus , the 2D isometric RTS engine that powers Wargus and the lesser developed Stargus . Tutorials are good. If you want a good player retention rate for your game, code a tutorial. I can't stress enough how effective that is - most players are lazy. Take me for instance. I'm busy, if I play a game I want near instantaneous enjoyment. If I don't know what's going on I will quit a game within 30s. Many FOSS games I install are uninstalled very quickly - not because I don't like them, but because I don't have the desire to learn them on my own. (Note, I do not play commercial games at all.) Good news for Egoboo ! It gains SDL_mixer support - Egoboo now music and improved sound support. They still don't have somebody producing Linux builds though, w...

Parallel Universe , a modification of Privateer Remake , has gotten itself a rather smart website and community forums . There's a good bit of work going on over there and the feedback on PU is generally pretty good. Definitely worth a look for space game fans. It is also part of a rather complex development scene based around Privateer & Wing Commander games. I'll get back to that in a bit. A couple of Ubuntu users have posted their first serious effort at a game, Slingshot . It's a fairly simple 2D affair, take it in turns to shoot at each other, your shots being affected by the gravity pulls of planets. I've mentioned Egoboo Resurrection a few times - a continuation of the classic game Egoboo. I've not really mentioned that it's only released for Windows despite the original predominantly being a Linux game. It just comes down to a lack of Linux based contributors. However there's another "branch" called Egoboo 2.x which has binari...

8 Kingdoms Legacy of Magic 8 Kingdoms is a 3D turn based fantasy strategy game. Build empires and conquer enemy kingdoms. I came across it in the Ubuntu forums where the poster suggested the graphics were not that great. Well, the graphics look pretty good to me. In fact I quite like the plastic-like model style. It gives the game an interesting look and feel. The game is at version 1.0 so is fully playable. :-) The map is hex based which also intrigues me. I always find hex more fascinating than boring square grids. There is only a Windows installer and a tar.gz available for download , so non-Windows players will probably have to compile it themselves. Keeping on the strategy theme, I came across a game I'd lost the link for a while back. Legacy of Magic is a very promising looking fantasy war game. The homepage is a development blog although there has been no update since November 2006 so I'm going to email the author to see how he is getting on. It would be a ...

Scourge 0.18 ( download ) has been released. :-) If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult . Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there. Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online. It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find t...

Egoboo 2.3.6 is released! This is a major development in what was a dead game. Egoboo used to be a darling of open source gaming, so I'm hopeful it will rise like a phoenix and restore it's reputation. Somebody has joined the FreeTrain localization effort! Daniel Markstedt, who also contributes to FreeCiv under the handles dmarks/hima, has started translating the game into English and posting patches to the mailing list (soon to be in SVN). The VDrift team are gearing up for a release. I downloaded the latest test autopackage and, I must say, I was impressed. Aside from a clunky menu, this felt like playing a commercial racing game. Nice graphics, nice car handling, nice tracks. It took me a while to work out how to get started [you need to press 'w' to shift up a gear to start a race, even with autoshift enabled] but it was a lot of fun after that. :-) I believe this will be a landmark release for VDrift that will see it rise to the challenge of being a via...

The Widelands team put out a release candidate for their next release, Widelands build10 , of their Settlers II inspired game. Check it out! Egoboo Now who remembers Egoboo ? Or the continuation effort that fizzled out? You know, the cutesy 3D roguelike where your characters waddled around? Well, there's a new place to go for Egoboo development. Several individual efforts have been released and now those efforts are being combined. The most notable ones are Egoboo 2.2.4 and Egoboo++ . Hopefully we will see a new release in very near future. :-) Pingus , the Lemmings clone with penguins, which seemed to have died a death at version 0.6.0 - which was a promising release as well with a nice playable tutorial island - has seen development restart. The original developer, and general FLOSS game hero, grumbel has been working on porting Pingus to SDL away from Clanlib . Whether this work will culminate in a release any time soon is another matter, but it is always nice to ...