Gaming Daily A-Z

This week saw finally saw the official release of version 3.0 of FlightGear . Notable changes: Highlights in this release include integration of the FGCom voice communications client within the simulator, improved terrain rendering, faster scenery loading, and improved usability. This release also coincides with the release of FlightGear World Scenery 2.0 – massively improved scenery data covering the entirety of the planet and incorporating OpenStreetMap roads and detailed terrain information from a variety of sources. Also interesting is the " Bombable " add-on, which adds combat mechanics:

So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift ). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before , and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon. However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam: The video is shot with FlightGear , everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here , the system itself is not FlightGear specific though. The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV , which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;) Less resource demanding are infrared LED...

GGJ 2012 Theme Global Game Jam 2012 is over and you can find all the by-nc-sa -licensed games here . We talked to the organizers about allowing free (as in freedom etc.) licenses and got some positive replies, but in the end it was too short a notice. We ask you now to write a short message to GGJ, asking for the inclusion of further licenses, for example a GPL+CC-BY-SA combination for GGJ 2013. Also feel free to discuss this in the comments. If you participated in GGJ, we would like to encourage you to release your games under free licenses in addition to the required nc license. EGP February 2012 Speaking of jams, the 7day-jam-during-one-month by Experimental Gameplay Project is " Infinite Worlds " for this month. STK Overworld As recently announced , one of the new features in SuperTuxKart 0.8 will be an overworld-connected challenge system. Durk Talsma: AI programmer Flight Gear's blog released a new interview . You can find the other interviews so far linked in this...

Bits & Bots: controlling two robots at once Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art. Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset Goblin Camp 0.2 brings a stockpile of changes: Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed. Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population. Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before. Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well. Constructions strobe under the cursor ...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 ( announcement ) has been released . The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes. The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt: Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more. Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain su...

I took a quick look at the Gluon Talk and the games booth at LinuxTag 2011 and thought I'd share some pictures at least. :)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of  ProFlightSimulator , a fork of FlightGear  on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post . ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game. This info is placed in  Disclaimer/Terms / IsThisFlightgear? . The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file  containing " Source code of these images, content and files "  (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here ) . Why PFS is not FlightGear The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation . I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for e...

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist. Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum . You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission! The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges. The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. ( .ogg ) And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. ( .ogg ) By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my...

The flight simulator FlightGear now has pretty clouds and lighting. I have not had the chance of giving the new release a try, so I decided to create a little gallery of the best-looking shots from the 2.0 gallery . Looks neat. But following video looks even better! ( youtube-dl link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4oMOFnD6bw )

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived. Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community. The scope of the Flightgear project is, as you might expect for a game 11 years in the making, nothing short of impressive. Whilst it does fall short in a few departments when compared to commercial flight sims, in others it is unequalled. Having no full time developers and being of such high quality is a testament to the dedication and organisation of it's development team. Flightgear has a pluggable flight dynamics model with 3 primary options, giving the enthusiast an opportunity to find a flight model that they feel is most accura...

200 posts to this blog now. :-) Pingus Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it. Also looking for testers is iteam , the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted . There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs. Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

I registered the domain name www.freegamedev.net yesterday. Initially it will just point to the Free Gamer forums , but I want to evolve that into a proper Free Software game development community with useful features e.g.: announce.freegamedev.net - a really easy way for people to announce Free games in a single location. No accounts, no web forms, just email to e.g. announce@freegamedev.net and (pending moderator approval) it'll appear. planet.freegamdev.net - a place where Free game development blogs are syndicated. forums.freegamedev.net, wiki.freegamedev.net etc Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this "let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs" that will never happen because we are all busy people. KISS . Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation. Flightgear A new Flightgear snapshot - 0.9.11pre1 - is available but it'...

Flying Guns Thunder & Lightening glHorizon glHorizon 3D cockpit Combat Simulator Project Decopter Hey, I'm up early - or in bed late. Anyway, I came across a few open source flight combat simulators last night and thought I'd comment on them. I thought the OS flight combat sim scene was barren, but that is definitely not the case. The main protagonist in this FLOSS game genre is GL-117 . It's been stable and polished for quite some time now. There is vaunted development on a v2 of the game, but nothing tangible to speak of. It is more an arcade game than a simulation but packs of fun nonetheless! RedShift is inspired by GL-117, so will be another arcade flight combat game. It's early days and in the progress of a rewrite from C to C++ but the author is optimistic that he'll be able to release an update in a month or so. Flying Guns is a WWI flight combat simulation game where you can engage as many as 100 AI planes at a time. It's intrigingly writte...

Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool. The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes. The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released ( changelog ). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game. And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard : I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/ . At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, b...