Gaming Daily A-Z

It's been a long and winding road for mascot racer SuperTuxKart, but after more than ten years of continuous and dedicated progress, the team has finally announced the release of build 1.0, marking an important development milestone for the project.  As quoted from the official release post: Yes, if you have followed our development a bit, that might be a bit of a surprise. But we have been asked why we don't call this release 1.0, and the majority of us developers discussed this and decided that indeed this release is a major milestone that deserves the big 1.0 number. Indeed a nice surprise and definitely a big step forward with the inclusion of online multiplayer! See more new features in the official release video: As usual you can download the game here . Also don't forget to head over to our forums to provide some feedback to the developers. Code License: GPLv3 Assets License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Stunt Rally 2.4 ... talk about feature creep, but I am not complaining ;) See more pictures of the release here , and don't forget to give some feedback on our forums . Oh and you can now browse cars and tracks online.

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now: More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here , and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log . Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

If you follow our planet , this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code . Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character: But their blog has many interesting technical details (and other screenshots + videos) to show off the new features. So if you like to also contribute, or just want to praise the great work, have a look at their FreeGamer hosted forums :)

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;) Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now: Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1 A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here . All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ). Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games: There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally , and I guess I can quote Twain here too: The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated! Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold , but even increased in pace :) Anyways, here is a great video: And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs": And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release . This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine , brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!

First, after 12 years of development, SuperTuxKart is a candidate for the March project of the month at Sourceforge. This is a huge honor and a significant boost for the project, so please vote for us here . Second, last month we were featured in Microsoft's IllumiRoom demo alongside Red Eclipse (another FOSS game) and Halo. For those who are interested, you can find the video in the last post. It's the second time STK has been featured in an unexpected place. The game has previously appeared in an episode of the show Friday Night Lights. The episode was critical of drug use and videogames, so downloads for the game probably didn't go up. I am not entirely sure why they chose a kart racer game over, let's say, postal 3, but licensing issues are likely to have played a prominent role in their decision. STK's permissive licenses mean, companies don't need to contact us before using it in media. Development news To try these new features out by compiling the lates...

Just released today, there is a new version ( 1.9 ) for Stunt Rally : Stunt Rally 1.9 It has a few nice new features, but probably the greatest update is a major change in the car handling physics, including an "easy" mode for those of us not wishing to practice for a career as a professional rally driver ;) and the guys would like feedback in the SR forum so let them know what you think. A big collection of (partially quite crazy) screens can be found here . Another great release that surfaced just today is Warzone2100 version 3.1.0. It cumulates all the changes made during the last 2.5 years, however if you tested the RCs already then there isn't too much new. Most notably they mention the new and fully fixed netcode, so that "out of sync" is a thing of the past (unless you have a crappy net connection like me :( ). Have fun playing!

Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here . It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games. In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally . Join the discussion here . Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;) One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here . Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D

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...

video:  StuntCarRacer/LambdaCube 3D demo StuntCarRacer (last release 2006) got re-born as a demo for LambdaCube 3D , a Haskell-based rendering engine. video: Naval Warfare Test Naval Warfare is a game in progress being made at Universidade de Brasília, using Gear2D  (Linux/Windows). image: celtic settlement in 0 A.D. 0 A.D. Alpha 11 got released . Some of these news have been powered by SourceForge's ability to sort games by update date .

Building bridges in OpenGOO video: New Physics in OpenGOO You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle , World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed. Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in  Shotgun Debugger ! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general. SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!) Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars Dust Racing  (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system. Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply. Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

Trigger Rally Online Edition race start on a sand track with green trees and an animated checkpoint ahead. Trigger Rally Online Edition  [ github ] is a WebGL racing game based on the concept of Trigger Rally . It has a more detailed car model than the classical game, however I am not sure about the game data license. It features replays too! The project was created by the lead coder of the original/classical Trigger Rally version. video:  Trigger Rally Online Edition gameplay By the way: if you are interested in helping me to sort out missing license-clear graphics and sounds for the classical Trigger Rally, I created a thread on OpenGameArt for that purpose.

We are getting a lot of nice mails from developers lately... not sure yet if I am annoyed by the spam or pleased that I don't have to do any research of my own :p These must be the benefits of real journalists who always get these nice offers from lobbying firms to write fair and balanced articles for them (yeah, I included some social commentary in this blog!). So... what was in my spam folder lately? Stunt-Rally got an version 1.5 release ( changelog here ) which a prominent new feature: multiplayer! Multiplayer test in Stunt-Rally 1.5 You can find a small guide to set up a multiplayer game here . Not sure if player collision is also implemented... it would be cool however ;) In general I really think the physics are too bouncy however... not sure if that hits the nail, but something feels off about them. Also... "LOD popping" trees is soo last century :p

Trophy's shop The top-down racing/shooting game  Trophy 2.0 brings championship, shop, key configuration, load/save features and lot of code refactoring. It requires ClanLib 1.0, which unfortunately fails to compile on Arch Linux. If you too can't get this game to run, there's still Bandit Racer  for playing in the browser.

Hi folks, My name is Artem (KroArtem in IRC) and I wanted to post an article here almost for a year. Nowadays I have an opportunity to do this. Let me introduce myself: I'm studying at St.Petersburg State University, Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Control Processes, trying to become a programmer and a mathematician :) In my spare time I like to test some linux games, report bugs, give feedback, translate them and so on. Actually this is the way I've met SuperTuxKart developers. Today I want to obtain an interview from them. Firstly, let me remind you what SuperTuxKart is. SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game that features free software mascots, has a cartoony style, includes different game modes and supports multiplayer (split-screen). You can visit STK's site and receive some more information about the game. SuperTuxKart's new track, Blackhill Mansion Secondly, I want to name our beloved developers and contributors: Joerg «hiker» Henrichs, Marianne «Auria» Gagnon,...

PonyKart Logo Yes, this is for real. PonyKart . Windows only. They have a SourceForge project . I don't know what to say.

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...

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [ video (00:57@YouTube) ] TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [ .ogg  (05:50/7.1MB) ] Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [ description ] Humm and Strumm  is an in-dev co-op game engine [ design .pdf (156kB) ] SuperTux ' level contest has four entries so far [ submission thread ]