Gaming Daily A-Z

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up. Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job. Programming Rocket Race in Syntensity [ more ] Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript. latest UFO:AI world view I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games ! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues . PARPG ...

There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI , the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.) Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though. FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved. Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced...

Nebula from FreeOrion So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today? On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae . Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds! I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE . You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic! OpenDungeons' map editor OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger 's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome... So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS ! There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Co...

New art for Adonthell There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash , an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".) Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions , the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo . Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games si...

Zero Projekt FIFE is starting to come of age. Although their tech-demo collaboration ended after a dispute between the two parties, Zero Project have continued their efforts and have settled on FIFE for their game project which has so far been two years in the making. To celebrate their second birthday they've put up an array of WIP screenshots . FIFE got a nice new layout for it's wiki too. The Castle 0.8.1 has been released. "The Castle is a first-person shooter game in a dark fantasy setting. Your main weapon is a sword, so the fight is mostly short-range. Three main levels are included, packed with creatures, items, and sounds. The game engine is based on VRML, OpenGL, OpenAL, and all shadows are done by the shadow volumes approach." Interesting but not quite there yet. Remember the classic game Theme Park (it started off the whole dang 'Theme X' genre)? Followed by the Rollercoaster Tycoon series (1-3)? Well these guys do and they are aiming t...

FIFE , the Fallout-like engine project, have made their first release of 2008, and put up a video of the tech demo that comes with the engine. Lots of new features, lots of progress, hopefully we'll see some exciting FIFE powered games coming along this year! D2X-XL is an spanky implementation of the engine for Descent 1/2, both very popular commercial games in their time. It adds lots of improvements, but the games themselves are proprietary and look a bit dated. So the D2X-XL guys are looking for people to contribute to a free D2X-XL media project . It's a good opportunity to create an awesome free game because the ships and designs from the Descent genre of games doesn't tend to be very complex, meaning it is easy to tackle on or two models without having to animate and skeletalize and add moles and skin pores and all the other daftness that seems to accompany character modelling lately. Back on topic, and they have some ships and textures and a few levels already,...

Well, I was fighting with myself not to post twice in a single day, but I have so much good stuff to post and the last post was simply a rant so it's OK! Topically, Extreme Tux Racer 0.4 has been released, bringing better graphics, a cleaner slicker ui, all new courses and more! You can find download information on the site. No new screenshots on the site yet though. I can't believe I've not seen this game mentioned anywhere else. (Who maintains the tome these days?! It doesn't even have an ETR entry!!!) ETCE XreaL ETCE (full name yet to be decided) is an already-underway project to create a successor to the popular (and proprietary) game Enemy Territory: Castle Wolfenstein. They have [wisely] chosen Sauerbraten as the base for the game. They have a forum , development screenshots , and buckets of enthusiasm. Could the gameplay of one of the most popular online FPS games of all time soon be found in a Free Software game? Let's hope so! Paintown is an a...

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...

Remember Mech Commander 2 ? Well, you might not, because I was originally thinking of Mech Warrior 2 when I saw it [I loved that game] but Mech Commander 2 looks cool none-the-less and Microsoft have released it [some time ago] under their own shared source license [whatever that means]. No free download on the page other than a source download so I don't quite get what the point of that is. The only place I know to grab the source is on the liberatedgames.com page for Mech Commander 2 . So I guess this is only for fans to fix bugs as I get the impression the game media/data is not under a 'free' license. However there is scope for a Linux port if somebody were so inclined. I did not know the original GTA and GTA2 were freeware these days. Grab them from liberated games. I don't know whether they work in WINE. It was quite nostalgic running over people in a stolen car in top down chases. Atomic Tanks 2.0 final is out. Woo! FIFE 2007.0 is also available. ...

ScummVM FIFE OpenTTD Today is a game engine special on Free Gamer. These are the projects that take your favourite [old school] titles and provide not only a native port but also fix all the nasties that had you saving and loading or even resetting your PC in the past. I remember the days of autoexec.bat and making every byte of that 640k count. Well these won't give you that fun but at least you get to play your old games! Let's start with the exciting FIFE: Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine . Started as an attempt to make a Fallout engine, it is becoming more ambitious and there are even rumours of a FIFE-based game in development. It should be able to run fan-made Fallout mods like the aptly named Fan Made Fallout . I have a pet favourite among RPG engines - GemRB . (I respect the steady progress on a difficult project.) This Infinity Engine emulator aims to be able to run the Baldur's Gate titles and even improve the experience they offer. The development...