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...

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK. So, where to start? Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown , which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates , a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself: Octaspire:Crates Tutorial A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare) , which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world". If you are following the development of the p...

*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 ...

The somewhat stop-start development of the various Tux Racer projects continues, but it looks hopeful that the latest incarnation of the iconic downhill penguin racer will not disappear like its predecessors. Extreme Tux Racer has finally released an updated 0.5 beta (Windows, Ubuntu, source for other Linuxi) after several months of inactivity. It's getting a bit of optimization love after I (yes, me, important mega me) unleashed my wrath helped a new developer by putting him in his place realise that ETR is not too detailed, as he incorrectly surmised , but ratyher suffers from some poorly implemented features that could be done a lot more quickly. Amazingly, I was right. :-) I'm always right and I will rule the universe soon! At least, once I've been to the doctor about this over-active procrastination gland of mine. Smokin' Guns , a total conversion of Quake 3 to recreate the feel of the Wild West is probably undermentioned here, although the graphics are star...

These days there's a flurry of open source game development activity and I don't have time to blog or follow it closely, but here's a highlight of some of the most recent game developments. Teeworlds 0.5.0 is out. Everybody's favourite game about tea, where you have an entire world of tea bags and... wait, Q is whispering something to me... *listens* Oh, it's not about tea. The clue was the double-e apparently. Still, despite the disappointing news that there still isn't a game dedicated to my favourite beverage, Teeworlds 0.5.0 is the largest update to the game yet. New features to everybody[ who doesn't love OpenLieroX or another game I can't think of]'s favourite 2D deathmatch Free project include demo recording, a revamped server browser and in-game voting, as well as a a gazillion changes under the hood. There is also a new, shiny 16-player limit. FreeCol ! The game where you get to free Colin! Right?! No? Dammit.... ! Ooooh, the col i...

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you. Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details. It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video: Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track. There's a new development release of Oolite , the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 ( announcement , changelog ) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project. FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say. Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video...

Frank and mushroom from Apricot There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine , focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping. Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be. The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space ba ck gr ou nds , which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actua...

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 ...

Mars: Land of No Mercy , it was looking dead, but it's back! The website is back online and hopefully so is development. I would point out that it was always available on Sourceforge but an offline website can be a death knell for an open source game, so it's good to see things running again. Ad Infinitum Ad Infinitum , a 2D space strategy game that looks very promising although is very early on in development and, other than the Sourceforge project page, doesn't have a website yet. It is also currently Windows only (Linux support done using WINE) but it is licensed under the GPL so there's always a hope that will change. Whilst there's a few online space strategy games, there's not too many singleplayer Free Software space strategy games out there ( FreeOrion and ?) so I hope to see this one establish itself. There's alpha releases available for download. A3DX There's a new 3D artillery battle game about, called A3DX . The website, like the game...

FreeCol A game update of interest (not been many lately) - FreeCol 0.7.2 . Not too much else of interest going on. A few months ago I would have spent some time digging up unusual games or extra development information. Or write some interview questions or something. My time however is very limited at the moment. I have a few Free game commitments and I really want to focus on creating Fortress. It's been a long time coming but I'm now at a stage where I want to contribute to a game as well as making copious amounts of net noise. As such perhaps it is time to make this a more public blog - have some people contribute to it. Make it more community-based. I'm thinking about it... The other thing I need to do is organise things a little for the www.freegamedev.net (forums current here ) community. A few simple tasks and things would be able to run without me but I've been too busy to sort that stuff out. Anybody got some free spare time? I couldn't find any low...

Global Conflict Blue Global Conflict Blue is a:" a real-time 3D naval and air warfare simulation game similar to Fleet Command and Harpoon. The goal is a scalable single player and multiplayer game that can handle scenarios ranging from simple engagements playable in 30 minutes to massive campaigns contested over weeks. It's only available for Windows but it's open source and a lot of it is written in Python so that can change. Intriguingly it has been adapted by the Thai Navy for for training purposes although sadly they haven't made their changes availalbe to the wider public. There's a Linux binary of FreeOrion available for download here . I'm not sure whether it's the latest stable version or latest from SVN but it should provide an opportunity for people who hadn't previously played the game to get an idea of what it is about. It is confirmed as working on an i386 Unbuntu Feisty system. Development of FreeOrion continues at the same steady p...

Interstate Outlaws Interstate Outlaws is a 3D vehicle deathmatch game based on the 2 Interstate games released by Activision. Developed using Crystal Space , they announced their first public release which shows a lot of promise. It is available for Linux and Windows. It reminds me a little bit of Automanic which is also a 3D vehicle deathmatch game based on the Interstate games and developed using Crystal Space. Automanic development seems to have stalled for the time being though. :-( There's rumblings of development resuming on Dungeon Digger , the Dungeon Keeper inspired project. Good. I was getting concerned that it was another early, promising project to bite the hard reality dust. FreeCol 0.7.0 is supposed to be out today. Also SuperTuxKart 3.0 was branched a week ago in svn so must be imminent too. Both should have Windows and Linux releases possibly with Mac releases to follow later. *twiddles thumbs impatiently*

Good news today. Not only did I finally succeed in getting to name a What the Duck strip, but there's a new Thunder and Lightning release. There are some sweeet new features, focused around AI and an aircraft carrier as well as purty graphical enhancements as you can tell from yonder youtube video below. Also the game is now available as an autopackage making it easier to install for Lusers everywhere, as well as Wusers (!?). That's the first time I've embedded a youtube video on this blog. Should I do it more regularly? I've avoided it in the past but I quite liked that one. iteam progress The iteam project is making rapid progress. Only incepted about a month ago they have made tangible progress. Whilst you still can only get this Gunbound-inspired game via SVN for the time being, it surely can't be long before an actual release should they keep up this kind of momentum. I'd never heard of Gunbound before I came across iteam. Showing my age a bi...

I'll start by noting I messed up my last post. Despite making the post on the 23rd, it was dated the 18th so any frequent readers may have easily missed it. So, for those who haven't yet read it, check out Freeciv3 Part I . Freecol Now, onto the real meat. In the last week, Freecol 0.5 was - at long last - released. The original colonization had a cult following and Freecol is only going to enhance that community. It's got a lot of potential. It's got some very nice visuals for a Free game and they're improving with every release. I've been lazy here and used a screenshot from 0.4 since I'm at work and can't load it up to take a new one, although to me it looks the same in 0.5 for that part of the game. The game is now very playable with plenty of depth but there's still a few negatives for me: The ugliness of Java does sneak through in places despite heavy UI customization. (God damn the default Java UIs are ugly - are Sun developers blind?) ...

The 0.5 release of Freecol is imminent ! I've been looking forward to this. Freecol is one of the best looking open source games with a very artistic interface. This will be the first really playable version of Freecol, and as such I expect it to take off as a project after this point. Good open source games always have a critical mass point where they blossom from one or two man efforts into community driven projects. This, I feel, is that point for Freecol. However, there is a twist! Well, I'm just being dramatic, but another Colonization project has cropped up. Proclaiming to be Colonization II, copyright violations withstanding, Swecol2 profresses to be an open source sequel to the 1994 classic. There is even a teaser trailer. On the face of things, Swecol2 looks promising despite being graphically (and seemingly gameplay-wise) inferior to Freecol. However, there is some cynism about and the fact that this is not yet open source makes is cause for suspicion: ......