Gaming Daily A-Z

A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates. OpenDungeons , an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog : New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste Particle effects! Reworked library logic and made research order configurable New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood Customisable creature sound effects! Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies In-game settings menu support! New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements New minimap camera with real-time rendering Dedicated server support with command-line parameters There's plenty of screenshots in the announcement on the frontpage of the OpenDungeons website (but no direct link for the announcement, frustratingly).     Explosions! Spells! The research tree The project has some very regular contributors (both

*hrmmpf* New FreeOrion 0.43 release . Unvanquished Alpha 18 . Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake . Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again. OpenMW 0.25.0 released. New Ya3dag 1.42 release. Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0. tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

A few day ago a much improved version of the 4X space strategy game FreeOrion was released. Check out this cool set of introduction videos (Part 1 , 2 , 3 ): Most notable additons: Very much improved, non-cheating AI. Sometimes experienced 4X players loose. Many GUI enhancements and shortcuts. Galactopedia expanded with game mechanics articles and many cross-links. Batch production of ships now possible. Improved sitrep notifications Reworked stealth and detection Almost everything has been enhanced, reworked, and better balanced. So go and kick some alien butt ;)

FreeOrion image: Moving a fleet around in FreeOrion video: FreeOrion testplay (best viewed at 720p HD ) FreeOrion 0.4.1 has been released a month ago. There still is no manual ship combat mode and there is a certain sluggishness regarding GUI responsiveness but the beautiful audio and graphics and consistent writing are definitely worth a try. You can check out a preview of current 3d ship combat tech demo in this video  (7m30s in). Xonotic image: Sniping a Hovercraft on Unsealed Trial 2 in Xonotic ( more screens ) video: Unsealed Trial 2 Vehicle CTF longplay I have been playing Xonotic on the [MoN] Vehicle Gameplay server  and quite enjoying it lately. Just recently, a first version of Unsealed Trial 2 ( screenshots ) has been released there. Some helpful vote commands: vcall timelimit 600 (for when the time is draining too quickly) vcall gotomap unseal (for when you realize that Unsealed Trial is the only playable map ;) ) If you'd like to record your own videos, all you nee

Evil Cult [ latest version ]. One of my favorite games. A 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) turn-based game with little micro-management so far (I consider this a huge plus). The developer recently posted a blog update . You can follow him on Twitter . Much development discussion is going on in this thread . I made two videos of the gameplay: a 5x time lapse and an Let's Play for your pleasure. Evil Cult 5x speed Music by (c) Natlyea Evil Cult Let's Play Regarding 4x games: There's an ongoing Master of Orion 2 rewrite. Latest activity in the repository: Mon Apr 11 11:55:42 2011 +0200. Here 's a custom news feed if you want to follow the project. (I won't be adding custom feeds to the planet for now). I also created a news feed generator for FreeOrion.

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

An update so quickly? Behold the Free Gamer world is coming to an end. :p So, we mentioned some promising RTS games in the last update. OK, I forgot to mention Spring1944 , but I am also a bit reluctant to mention Spring and its mods since it is such a pain in the backside to get it running correctly. :( Back on topic... there a quite a few really great non RTS FOSS strategy games. I guess I don't really need to mention the classics to the typical reader of this blog, but Wesnoth , FreeCiv , FreeCol and UFO:AI are all very playable and good looking games! However there are others that get less attention and also some that show great promise! Advanced strategic command Advanced strategic command is one of those that gets relatively little news coverage, even though it is a really playable game. Granted, its graphics are pretty much the same as its big inspiration, the classic Battle Isle series , but that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right? A new version was just rele

Wesnoth Knight Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits . Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled. PARPG Weapons PARPG is back from the dead . 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game. Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon ! Widelands is getting randomly generated maps . Simutrans Subways It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean! There'll be loads more updates to your

Everything is so cheap after Christmas. I mean, look what you can get for FREE! :-) The FreeOrion project just released version 0.3.11, which comes with some polish of existing features and a few small new ones. Here's the announcement . Only a Windows binary is up at the moment, bah, source only from SVN. I complained. (I'm good at that.) There are statically compiled SVN binaries for Linux but you have to go digging to find them. Still, when digging you can find treasure, like this ship development thread . Purty! UPDATE: here's the Linux binaries and here's a quick play guide - which you really do need, there's so many clicky thingamajigs. Platinum Arts Sandbox , the game design tool based on the Cube 2 engine, saw version 2.3 released a few days ago. From the announcement: Here are the awesome new features! * New 3D sidescroller Mario like mode! Also there is a seperate RPG project, check the wiki! [ link - note it is aimed at kids and in concept

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

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world. Blood Frontier , the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release. Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think). There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, thi

FreeOrion star map detail Cheer, for a new release of the awesomely pretty FreeOrion has seen the light! This time both Windows and GNU/Linux builds are provided . Here are the features: New and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.) Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape Reworked drag-and-drop design screen New ship parts Python AI interface improvements Minor UI improvements Bug fixes Check out the Roadmap to see what to expect from future releases! FreeOrion icon art OpenGL will be required in coming versions (currently it's semi-required). While I know that there are people who have old machines and countries where it's non-trivial to get reasonably fast hardware, I can't say that I blame anyone for using hardware acceleration and even making it a requirement. I think it's rather the job of Libraries to allow programming games which make use of OpenGL and will automatically disable effects and use software rendering when no acceleration is

Adonthell's broccoli bushes. James Nash has kept working on vegetation sprites for Adonthell 's art repository (which is quite meager right now.) He is using layers for producing the images. What you don't see is the fact that in the original image I have the outlines and surfaces separated as individual layers so I can easily re-colour them to make variations. Equally I can hide some layers such as the leaves. This way it is much easier to manipulate the images and to create a richer variety of objects. Layered images can be seen as "source" files for flat/"compiled" bitmaps. Great to know that people actually use this editing-friendly layered-images technique for producing game art. Good news for Linux-users! Automatically built binaries of FreeOrion's latest SVN revision are available from psitronic.de/div/FO . They will allow you to play the game without having to build it, which isn't that easy on some distributions. Best thanks to krodd

I was close to putting some kind of melodramatic title like "the beginning of the end" but it would have been, well, melodrama so opted for something more accurate. The blog is going into cruise control. Less posts, less frequently. Some time in the next week or so the forum RSS feeds will get integrated into the blog and this will basically mean the community gets to post news here and the blog itself will be more article focused. My part in this, other than the actual integration work, will be that any game updates I find I will now post in the Game Announcements section in the forum. People who want to make a fuss about their games can post in the Game Showcase section . Projects that need help can post in the Help Wanted section . All three threads will be the focal point of the blog frontpage. These days there's a lot of activity in the forums and it's a better place to go for info than the blog. Also there's plenty of project-specific news to be foun

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick. Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release. FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development. NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!" Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their o

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him. FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely. Sauer NYC Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style. Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is.

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

Linux users can now get their hands on the latest version of FreeOrion , the turn-based space stategy project inspired by Master of Orion games, without having to compile it themselves. See this thread for details. It worked well for me, although the game is not easy to figure out and is incomplete - I couldn't work out how to do too much. However for fans of the genre the project is definitely worth following and I'm sure the FO guys would be glad of any extra help. There's murmours over at the FreeTrain project - tangible progress on an SDL port is evident . One of the developers posted a screenshot with a basic UI much closer to the original A-Train games. Moving to SDL is the major hurdle for making FreeTrain run on Linux - currently it uses .NET and DirectX so can only be run on Windows. Forunately the project is moving towards Mono and SDL. :-) Er, what else is happening? Not too much... There's an opinion article on Linux Lookup discussing the problems

There's a new release of SoulFu . Whilst the source still comes under a funny license that many would not consider true open source, I believe any restrictions previously placed in the game are now removed. Downloads are up for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. If you like the game concept but feel strongly about the source code license then the main alternative has to be Egoboo Resurrection - ironically also originally developed by Aaron and no surprise given the graphical similarities. [Edit - a better link , thanks Jacky. Also worth noting is that Egoboo Resurrection is currently available only for Windows although it should be compilable for Linux.] Also the FreeOrion team snuck out another release - 0.3.1-rc6 - a couple of weeks ago. It's an explore, expand, exterminate [is that correct] kind of space strategy game with a very nice user interface and designed for a deep gameplay experience. I don't recall seeing this release announced anywhere. Also, it seems a st