Gaming Daily A-Z

Hallow thar Free Gamers! Warmux , the project formerly known as Wormux, is dying. (It amuses me how "formerly" sounds like "formally", doesn't it? Or is that my colloquial pronunciation?) The current development version has rather minor changes: improved game mode (ie including weapon), new "squad" play (teams can ally). But there's little more coming. What this means is that the next version - if any - of WarMUX, might be the last. At least, it is most probably over for the author of these words. Who knows. It was not long ago that the PARPG lead was calling that dead (and I scolded him for it, did I). The great thing about Free software is that it can live on. Moving on to more vibrant projects, and ToME4 beta 29 30 31 is in the wild. The current development pace is quite astonishing. More graphical tiles, bug fixes, play balancing, and some useful optimizations - don't get addicted! zzoxx In a similar vein, the author of Sco...

Beware traveller. I am here to slay your computer. Unstable fun awaits, betas with bits that may break your bit cruncher. That's what open source is about. Blowing up people's PCs with untested, untried, untrustworthy alpha and beta amateur programmer software! Well, perhaps some of the programmers are not amateurs... Good news, settlers of the new world! (Or those who feel like settling new worlds but were born in the wrong period of history.) FreeCol 0.10-alpha has been released. Get it from the unstable version download area of their website (the current stable version is 0.9.5). Speaking of Free* games, did the latest FreeCiv beta get a mention? FreeCiv 2.3.0-beta1 supports gigantic maps and over a hundred simultaneous players. Development of VDrift is, as ever, ongoing. You can test out build 3030 put together on the 25th Jan. After a period of suffering regressions, some changes have been sidelined to bring the main development branch back to a more stabl...

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had! FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...) I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5 . FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released. Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing! The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community . These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos ! OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound. After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not ...

Iris2 There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days: Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features ( announcement ) Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances ( announcement ) SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download ( announcement ) Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor ( news page ) Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something) Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info NewCol NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine ...

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...

Freeciv 2.1rc1 is now available for download. I haven't yet played it but at first glance there's no 'save/load dialog implemented' in the SDL client part of the news announcements - which means, well, the SDL version is still incomplete. Also, at the moment, only source packages are available for download but expect binaries to follow soon. Ultimate Stunts 0.7.3 is also out. More iterative improvements to a game with a long development history . I'm looking for award suggestions , as I want to push the Free Gamer 2007 awards in November/December. (Won't that be a change, a set of awards whose year represents the actual year they apply to?) You can suggest in the forum or feel free to suggest in a comment here. Anything else I can fit in with 30s left on the clock? The LibreGameWiki seems to be doing well in terms of collecting information on all the Free Software games out there so check it out if you have a minute. There's still quite some way ...

I really shouldn't be posting right now because I have a million more important things to do but I love you guys so... There's a preview version of Vega Strike 0.5.0 up for download for Intel Mac users . The VS devs need some feedback on most notably sound due to porting issues. Users of other platforms will have to use subversion for the time being but Windows users don't need to compile as there's a .exe in subversion. Want to know what OpenTTD will look like when the new graphics are ready? Well there's some interesting screenshots in the Ubuntu forums . I know this guy has riled the OpenTTD community by posting work there that they don't approve of. Issues to do with language barriers and badly put-together mockups / inserted graphics. Still, it seemed a bit harsh to me but for some reason he doesn't understand English. Anyway, this babble is digressing too much. Globulation2 and Bos Wars got updates. Hopefully C&C being released as freewa...

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb , and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I'd give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at - now maybe I'm not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious. Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems - occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X - and I'm too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige. Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy :-( so I haven't tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely . Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided. There's also a new Thunder 'n' Lightning...

Since I'm a bit tight on time today I'm just going to post a few gripes I have with Freeciv 2.1beta6. Don't get me wrong, I think this is shaping up to be a really, really nice game, but the SDL interface has some very annoying usability issues to address. If you run it in windowed mode, you can't resize the game by resizing the window. The game display logic should be independent of the resolution, an absraction that many games fail to make. Auto-scrolling is annoying. It is especially annoying when playing in windowed mode when you are often moving the mouse cursor in and out of the game window. It would be better to scroll when pressing the right-mouse-button since the RMB is already used for manual movement. There is no UI to save/load games in the SDL client. A work around is to open a chat dialog and use the /save and /load commands. Freeciv dialogs have a red X with the tooltip "Cancel" to close them. Not only is 'cancel' a horrible word ...

A new beta of the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 has been released. The last major beta - beta4 - was nearly 5 months ago. There was a beta5 (uploaded a few days ago) but it was not announced due to some serious bugs. Anyway, beta6 is now available from the Freeciv FTP server. Whilst it is currently only up there as a tarball, a Windows and Mac binaries won't be far behind and I'm sure packages for the Linux distribution of your choice will pop up in the relevant places e.g. getdeb for Ubuntu. The main changes since beta4 are numerous bug and stability fixes. Freeciv 2.1beta4 was a bit prone to crashing unexpectedly - beta6 should be in much better shape. There isn't yet a NEWS page up for beta6 but since beta6 is just beta5 with a few critical fixes, the beta5 NEWS page gives you a good idea of what changed since beta4. Anyway I'll compile it a bit later if a .deb hasn't appeared by then. I think Freeciv 2.1 is going to be one of the best open source games to poin...

Well what would you know. There actually was plenty happening yesterday just I wasn't looking in the right places... The assualt course racing game Sturmbahnfahrer has been renamed for reasons of political correctness. The new name is Stormbaan Coureur (dutch for "assault course racer") and there is a new release, version 1.5, which has save points, a half pipe, turntables, brakelights and more. It is currently only available as a source download , but hopefully that'll change soon. Whilst the game is aimed at Linux, it uses PLIB and ODE so is theoretically compilable on anything those two support (which is all major platforms). Crashtest Stormbaan Coureur is also the basis for another game - crashtest , the education crash test simulator for Linux. Interesting... :-) There's also a new version of the Atomic Tanks . It's a worms clone and the project makes regular releases. Good stuff. There's a lovely long post on the Vega Strike devblog from t...

There's very little of note happening. I should use the opportunity to work on some more interesting content for Free Gamer (fixed lists? awards? etc) but instead I have a new laptop (shiney!) and so will spend time fiddling with it. Want to know what the Linux Game Tome looked like 10 years ago ? Where is FreeCiv 2.1 ? Patience is a virtue, but an updated beta would be nice. I'm contemplating checking out latest SVN to see where it's up to. I played SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 a bit. Lots of potential but still rough around the edges. Some very dodgy collision detection, very annoying instant deceleration if you go slightly off the road, and only 1 really decent track (island) plus a couple of OK ones. Most of the tracks, IMHO, are not worth including. There's an interesting list grumbel's grumbles ; things grumbel thinks are wrong with SuperTux . I think he's spot on with most of them, he's an astute game programmer ( Free Gamer interview ) and fixing most...

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess. I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1 , and SuperTux 0.4 , and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles. Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum . Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my ...

Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02 rc1 - the game bringing the classic commercial title Privateer kicking and screaming into the modern era - is ready and they require testers . They only provide a Windows binary, however the game is based on the cross-platform Vega Strike game engine and previous versions have had Linux and Mac binaries too. PGG is just one of the variants to spring from the original Privateer Remake. Another one, Privateer Universe , seems to be gaining a bit of popularity - it adds to the gameplay whereas PGG strives to remain true to the original. It's a 3D space combat RPG, for the very few that don't already know. Freeciv Tileset updates - Freeciv 2.1 imminent? Hmm, rumour mill, speculation, and sensationalism, all in one. ;-) Er, "A Sauer Mod" The so-titled Unnamed Sauer Mod is looking promising as the developer continues to make progress - now with zombies. In case you didn't read about it previously here on FG (I did mention it, right?...

Welcome to post number 100 on Free Gamer. Slowly I am finding out how to push blogger to it's limits. The list is starting to look much better, now that the layout is getting there. The tedious work of populating it with real information is looming. Once that is done, several more mini-lists will sprout up. Anyway, back to the daily grind of talking about Free Software games. It's a hard knock life, it is. ;-) Starting with Freeciv , which saw 2.1beta4 released ( download ) over the weekend. (Not sure how I missed that yesterday.) It fixes many crashes so hopefully should be a lot more stable than 2.1beta3 which, in my experience, was fairly ropey. Initial feedback seems to be pretty good. I created some Ubuntu packages for Freeciv-2.1beta4 . I felt like doing a good deed for the day, or something like that. Beyond The Red Line Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line is a game being developed by fans for fans of the series and is based on a modified version of the...

Open Football I'm really excited this morning. Go on, ask me why! Well, since you asked :-) it's because I came across a new football game project... Open Football . Ok, it's only available from SVN , the game is far from complete, but look at the screenshot. It looks full of potential! Project description: "Open Football aims to become the new best multiplatform soccer game that everyone can enjoy. Providing arcade style playing while still mantaining the manager side of the game ensures hours of high quality, nail bitting fun." I'm giddy just imagining it. I hope they set up some more infrastructure (think nicer phpBB forums, mailing lists etc) so people can get involved. As all you budding developers [should] know, infrastructure fosters communities. No infrastructure, no community! And the SF.net forums are a pile of stinking < censored > so don't rely on those. ;-) So, yeah, I want to install Freeciv 2.1beta3 on my Linux laptop. Wha...

Another game whose development appeared to have stagnated was Glest . This 3D RTS was widely acclaimed as a leading open source game when it came out, with high quality graphics and solid gameplay. Although it lacked features, it seemed like the ideal platform to build a game that had depth as well as eye candy. Sadly development just seemed to stop but it looks like it's restarting, with the release of Glest 2.1-rc1 . Don't expect anything spectacular with this release but hopefully it's the start of a return of Glest development. However a game that has shown very nice steady development activity (something that always makes me happy) is VDrift . And a new release is imminent . With a host of new features that really add to the gameplay, this release... well, I'll let their lead developer 'thelusiv' explain: I'm pretty excited about the release...this will be our first in almost five months, and not only fixes a ton of problems but also adds lots of ...

Bygfoot Football Manager development has been resumed. *Cheers!* The latest unstable release is 2.1.1 and contains updates to the UI, the addition of a "luck" factor to make long term success more challenging, and new country definitions. Bygfoot is a good game. I played version 2.0 a fair bit because I've always been partial to football management games. However, the UI is atrocious. It's clumsy, it does things you don't expect, it forces you to do things you should not have to. For example... In football you tend to have a first team - that is, your 11 best players - with substitutes to cover that first team. So typically, assuming no injuries or tiredness, you always start with the same 11 players. This is by far the most common approach. However in Bygfoot when you make a substitution in a game, the "team change" is carried over past the game. This forces you to manually undo substitutions after every game. Being a management simulation...

Freeciv 2.1 beta3 is ready ( changelog summary ). I'm on holiday in Vietnam at the moment so won't be able to play it for a few weeks., but I'm sure it's a good release. Also yesterday Blender 2.43 was released with a very impressive list of new features . Now FOSS game developers no longer have an excuse to have rubbish art in their games. ;-) Anyway, back to my holiday, Ciao!

No, I haven't ignored Free Gamer, I just haven't really come across much interesting. It's like all the interesting projects crawled under some rocks and went into hibernation. I guess post-Christmas everybody is busy with work and parking fines so need to take a break from creating free games for us to play. Bastards. ;-) I could just keep going on about Foo x.y release etc but really that's what the Game Tome is for. I need to sit down and do some reviews I guess... XWars is kinda fun. Windows only though. :( A drink with that? :) I really wish the Freeciv team would release another 2.1 beta. It's been so long since the last one. I'll try and think of something more creative for the next post to Free Gamer, instead of some random whining. Now my cup of tea is cold. [cartman] GOD DAMN IT! [/cartman] :P