Gaming Daily A-Z

We are a bit late to the party (partially due to my current German Telekom induced Internet abstinence at home :( ), but last month the first stable release of Annex: Conquer the World was released. For those out of the loop: Annex is a so called total conversion mod (albeit standalone) of Megaglest . You can read up on its development and the latest news in their forum post on the MG forums.

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently: Annex beta2 game-play Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;) But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

Wow... can believe this myself, but after hyping this cool Megaglest mod a few times here on FreeGamer I totally missed their first release last month :( Here as a reminder how cool Annex-Conquer the World looks: Annex - Conquer the World Currently there is only a Windows port available, but a Linux version is promised for the next release ... Edit: I was confused about the media licensing... more or less all the new assets are CC-by-NC-SA, which is as you might know not considered FOSS due to the NC clause. A pity really :-/ So... how was I reminded of this gem? Well check out this cool interview with the Megaglest developers from the Greek site OSArena (in English though) ;) Now I am off booting into windows to have another round with Annex ;)

Disclamer: Yes I am fully aware that the following two game do not have libre media, and that one of them will never have unless they get away from the copyrighted IP! That said... the following two gems are really nice examples of what can be done with FOSS engines if some skilled artists work with them.. and they are free as in beer too :p The first one has been mentioned before on FG, and is a Mod for the nice FOSS RTS Megaglest ( Did we mention that one had a small new release too? ). Annex: Conquer the World , doesn't seem to have it's one website yet (link goes to Moddb), but check out this awesome new video of that game (gives me a nice Starcraft vibe!): Annex gameplay teaser Actually I don't know anything about the media license on this one, and it isn't released yet, but the closed development process makes me doubt we will have much luck in regards to the media (source must be GPL just as Glest), but hey... you never know! The second one is as previously ment...

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project... Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006. ...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features : Glest The original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared to the continuations. Glest: Advanced Engine aka GlestAE A community-led continuation of Glest by adding features and rewriting significant portions of the Glest codebase. Mega Glest With frustrations growing about the lack of stability of early GlestAE work, and the length of time between releases, a prolific modder started to add key features such as improved multiplayer, a 'mega pack' of mods (which inspired the name), and port useful changes back from GlestAE - the result was MegaGlest. For some good videas of both forks...

A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here. MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest , which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE ) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 6. And believe it or not, qudobup and me tried to play a round (extreme n00b alert :D ), which we recored and commented here: Megaglest Multiplayer: Julius vs. qubodup [ HD .ogg (485M) | tinyogg | no-commentary .mp4 (364M)] All done with Free software by the way :D ( MegaGlest , glc , Audacity , PiTiVi and Mumble )! Interview with the Megaglest team For this Meg...

Rigs of Rods is going open source . How cool is that? Rigs of Rods (also known as RoR), is a truck, car, airplane and boat simulator. You can drive, fly or sail in total freedom in an open environment. What makes RoR different to most simulators is its unique soft-body physics: vehicles chassis and wheels are simulated in real-time as flexible objects, giving the simulation an extremely accurate behavior, while allowing the vehicles to be simply specified by their structural composition, as a network of interconnected nodes (forming the chassis and the wheels). Crashing into walls or terrain can permanently deform a vehicle in a realistic manner. In addition to its unique soft-body physics, RoR also features an advanced flight model based on blade element theory, allowing the accurate simulation of any airplane, base on their physical dimensions and wing airfoils. It also features an accurate buoyancy model based on elemental pressure gradients, enabling boats with complex hulls to m...

It's something-am, I have overdue work, and a Freshmeat announcement put a bee in my bonnet about posting. LinCity 2.0 LinCity-NG 2.0 is out in the wild, and boy is it starting to look like a nice game. There are only two things that look a bit weak these days - the name (NG? Linux-only?) and the UI (a bit scrappy). For those who don't know, LinCity-NG is a GotM fork of Lincity which brings it into this century with much nicer graphics and a more informative user interface. Plenty of nice new graphics (notably vegetation, grass, trees) make the game look aesthetically smooth. New resource management (water) adds to the depth of gameplay. There's a load of other new aspects too but there's no official announcement and I'm too busy procrastinating to go digging. Glest (the 3D RTS) is dead, long live Glest! No, really. Mainline Glest development has ended and Glest Advanced Engine ( information ), a community-born enhancement, is to officially become the new ...

Glest 3.1.2 has been released ( changelog , linux ). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this. SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge . It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed. There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer d...

Lots of activity amongst the FreeGameDev crowd. Qubodup has created an amazing new forum skin , so participating in the forums has never been a more pleasant experience than it is now, and he's still tweaking away. A new feature, Wikiwatch , a sort of planet for wikis, was added. Now I just need to improve the blog (include announcements rss, update links, generally nicer layout) and FreeGameDev is go. 5.... 4.... 3... etc. ;-) In terms of game news, it's gone a bit quiet, fortunately for me. Glest with shadows Bloodmasters Glest got shadows. Purty. :-) The OpenClou! team have put up their first model concepts, as seen on the Sourceforge project . Lovely! Bloodmasters will soon be open source. It's a 3D top-down arcade shooter with plenty of blood. Will report on it more when it is. Yay for me . :-D I wanted to put a screenshot up but Blogger is being lame... will put it up later. Edit: Done! Bridge Builder 2006 is now available for Linux from here . It'...

Glest: Alien Invasion Gearhead2 Chromium BSU Hot on the heels of Glest 3.0 is... Glest 3.1 ! Great to see the rejuvenated development of a poster Free Software game. This version continues to add multiplayer features such as in-game chat. Oh, and a new menu background. Eye candy! :-) The mod scene for Glest has also never been healthier. The latest mod to show up (although currently just a WIP) is Glest: Alien Invasion . Pictures speak etc - see the images. In the grand scheme of things, websites aren't that important. Or are they? Gearhead2 is a mech-based rogue-like. Maybe you like the sound of a [mech-based] rogue-like. To everybody else, the term 'rogue-like' tends to mean 'no graphics', so when you visit a web page like the homepage of Gearhead2 , combined with the knowledge of it being a rogue-like, I bet the vast majority of people go no further. It looks awful, the screenshots link doesn't work, and because in the lay visitor's mind the ...

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 ...

Ok, ok, I know, I've been a bit rubbish lately. I'm struggling with the same problems that afflict many, many Free Software developers. Firstly I over-committed myself and the blog is lower priority than the various Free Software projects I should be working on. The blog is, if you like, the end result of far too much web surfing indulgence. If I can't indulge, the blog material quickly dries up. It's why nobody else does it; you can't do it if you don't do a lot of research and research takes a lot of time. Fortunately, over the last year a few other sites have come up. Libregamewiki, the FreeGameDev site (the forums , the awesome art search site and wiki ) have materialized and the Linux Game Tome has been somewhat resurgent now it has reliable hosting. I like to think that in some small way I somehow caused the new waves of Free Software gaming that's hitting the beaches lately. Butterfly on freegamer, tornado on alpha centurai or something li...

Quite a lot to cover, simply because there's a lot of small items that have backed up in my little "FG updates" list which I've been waiting to pool together. Firstly, the "big" news in that UFO:AI 2.2 got released. There's plenty to write home about , tons of new features, and it's an awesome game. I'm not a great fan of some of the micro-management although it's part of the original X-COM games so understandably part of UFO:AI - I would like to see some automation aids (auto-assign ammo etc) - but that aside this is a really, really good game. If it was released as a commercial game it'd be respected, and because it's Free Software it's only going to get better. Here's a video: So, the Apricot project is gaining pace. They have still to decide on what type of game they are making. I hope they make, out of their choices, a platform game. I must say, I really disagree with some of their assertions. If a platform gam...

Glest has carried the accolade of being a leading open source game due to the relatively polished nature of it's graphics at the time of release a few years ago. Since then, sadly, the development pace has not matched the original hype surrounding the game. For the first time in quite a while, there's a major development push. This time, the emphasis is on making it multiplayer . There's a windows binary patch, and the code is in SVN for other OS users, although is largely untested on anything other than Windows. Also released today was Star Ship Troopers: Last Defense 2 , a mod for Glest. Updated models can be seen in this thread . The download is a whopping 130mb so there's plenty of new content to chew over in there. That's a lot of Glest goodness. Enjoy!

There's a preview version of Bos Wars 2.4 , an RTS in the style of Red Alert, available for download for Linux and Windows (and should compile on other OSes). This version introduces... "a completely new rate-based economy. Energy is produced by power plants and magma by magma pumps. Building also consume resources continously instead of requiring an upfront payment. It sounds interesting. Bos Wars development is very active although the majority of developer communication happens on irc instead of the mailing list, which can make it look - to the casual onlooker - as if not much is happening. They could probably do with a devblog too! Freedroid RPG FreedroidRPG 0.10.2 final got released as well - well, renamed from 0.10.2rc4, whichever way you prefer to call it. One thing I didn't mention yesterday was that I really like FreedroidRPG's graphics . They are very distinctive and quite good. :-) The SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 release is tantalisingly imminent. Announcement...

Did I not mention this Sauerbraten update ? I don't recall doing so, and I swear it was not a thread in their forum at the weekend despite being listed as posted on the 12th June. Anyway... it fixes a whole lot of bugs, adds graphical enhancements, and cleans up scripting support a little. Probably more of an update for people making mods/games with Sauer than players but, shucks, I love this project. Embarrassingly this was a 2006 release... *oops* There's the possibility of a StarShip Troopers: Last Defense , the Glest mod, becoming available for FreeBSD . The Java Classic RPG project has posted a snapshot for anybody who wants to play with it in it's very early stages of development. Work continues at an impressively frantic pace , soldiering away on features. Hopefully a modeller or two can start contributing to the project to make the artwork updates as impressive as those to the codebase. I keep pestering the Vega Strike team to make a new release. I, and ...

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 ...

OTRS Well, look what we have here. Joining the likes of Boson , Glest , and TA:Spring / TA3D is another Free 3D RTS game: ORTS . The interesting thing about ORTS is the motivation - the AI. ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games. <snip> ...the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines. <snip> ... the ORTS project [is] a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games. <snip> Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge the...