Gaming Daily A-Z

Octower! BAM! Word War Vi runs on Pandora ! (Have a feed !) Split-screen! BAM! Egoboo alive, kicking and now has a pretty website! Lazza made a feed ! Code! BAM! jClassicRPG development continues !

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 released! [ great changelog! ] Former CubeCreate lead dev will now work on OctaForge (so far #octaforge  chat is the only piece of infrastructure) Search and Rescue II has improved sound and uses OpenAL now jClassicRPG's developer wrote short-term goals for the project (also forum registration now works) Creative Commons licenses are now officially available in .txt format (for easy inclusion in Your Game Project) Adam Drew of Red Hat will webcast about Linux/Open Source music production April 20 Steampunk MMO project Tempest in the Aether will have an OpenGameArt-featured art contest  during Weekend of April 30th - a todo list will be released on April 20th

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts. Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer: That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all...

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up. Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job. Programming Rocket Race in Syntensity [ more ] Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript. latest UFO:AI world view I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games ! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues . PARPG ...

There has been some activity in the most prominent free (as in freedom) software 3D role-playing games DungeonHack, jClassicRPG and Radakan. DungeonHack Green, water and village in DungeonHack [ more ] DungeonHack (DH) 0.10 has been released in form of win&lin 32bit biaries and a few commits later I was able to compile the game on my 64bit Arch Linux machine. It is the first release of DH that does not rely on non-free libraries . I played the game for the first time and I was positively surprised. Not only can I move around in the nice-looking (endless) landscape but also fight, cast magic, pick up items, enter houses and dungeons as well as talk to npcs. Physics also work (see barrels video below). On the downside: the current code is crash-happy and there is little content: In toto three houses, two dungeons, two enemy types, two items, one non-player character, one spell). Zombie roasting á la DH The next DH aim is to create a typical RPG village, add some inventory and stat...

Here is some commercial free software gaming news, which I partially failed to deliver on time. Paul's Music Liberation Experiment is a product of jClassicRPG's lead developer following his passion for composing music. He releases music tracks under the gratis but non-free BY-SA-NC license and visitors can donate to specific tracks, which in return will be released under the free BY-SA license . The money earned from this will be covered to cover Paul's expensive music software purchases and hopefully a proof that at least small bucks can be made with freely licensed media. It's called " experiment " after all. :) I am a big fan of this project! I detest the non-free Creative Commons licenses, but this method is perfect to illustrate just how many people think that being free is more important for media rather than just being gratis. Tremulous T-Shirt Logo Ministry of Frag (MoFrag) sells a Tremulous T-Shirt and 25% go to the Tremulous team. That's the ...

"Damn Free Gamer is popular." So says the L-echo developer, as well as posting graphic illustration on the project home page. L-Echo is a free and open source clone of the game Echochrome (aka Mugen Kairou). Version 0.4.3 arrived in early February, although performance was unplayable on my non-hardware-accelerated laptop. Freedroid RPG version 0.12rc1 - a 2D isometric RPG, a bit like Diablo, but not like it at all. There's lots of bug fixes, a new tutorial, a new starting level, lua scripting, and more! Help them playtest it so that version 0.12 is solid. " Tesliz ", a 3D turn based strategy game, inspired by Wesnoth, written in Python on top of OGRE. Early days here. Speaking of Wesnoth had lots of updates over the Christmas period, building up to a stable 1.6 release. That game has some amazing artwork these days, like these wizard portaits . They have lots of playtesters already. If you don't know what Wesnoth is, crikey, just click the link a...

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42 USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems . I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time. The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons: Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems) microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it Here's the link to the pd -licensed diagram source. In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible. Well...

Levelhead I don't really know yet how to play Levelhead , but it has GPL -ed code and CC-BY-SA -ed art assets. This means it's good, right? Right? Well, I'll try to find out whether or not you can play it without having to cut a LCD display in mouth-sized pieces first. Sandbox co-operative map editing There's news regarding Sandbox , the child-friendly Sauerbraten-based 3D game/engine/editor. A completely freely licensed version is in the works. (Code and media.) So, hopefully we'll have a release soon, which will be includable in Debian for example. I'm very interested in this project, as it's obvious aim is to make content/game-creation a child's play! MonkeyWorld 3D MonkeyWorld 3D is a BSD License d scene editor for the jMonkeyEngine which I found through a thread on Radakan's forums . Radakan's WorldTool is currently frozen as the energy is now aimed towards the general MonkeyWorld 3D editor. Maybe even jClassicRPG will benefit from it....

jClassicRPG detail jClassicRPG 'Vigilante Eye' is out for us to get . The game engine is nearing completeness, dialogs and a quest system need implementing. Then we'll be able to slay our first 15 foxes for the lazy shepherd Osgar Lindquist . The following features all-ready work: Fighting: Bash (monsters) and be bashed (by monsters)! Items: Collect gold and pieces of wood from slain foxes! Camping: Rest to regenerate health, energy and mana! Leveling: Spend hours deciding on what stat to increase! And this is where you come into play! Get the release . Timong is waiting for your bug reports , patches and feature requests ! =D The visual (and aural) and performance improvements that happened lately are pretty much wow. The terrain now looks very natural compared to earlier versions, there are new animated models, there is a tropical background sound loop. I created a rather long video that shows off some of the new features. ( Direct download , 118 MB, recommended) SF.ne...

Ludum Dare 12 starts in three hours. There are three lists of hints for python game programmers who are going to join the competition: SolHSA’s , mrfun's and GBGames' . Hints that help you be resourceful, constructive and alive before, during and after the contest. jClassicRPG is getting bigger , prettier and cooler . By the way: Orbit-Hopper does work on my machine. Only the 1.16 build creates segfaults. 1.15 works fine. (Though suffers from extreme slowdown when I try to record it.) OpenArena 0.8.0 Post Scriptum: OpenArena 0.8.0 has arrived in a bigger than 300 MB archive . It contains some new media and " mission packs " Missionpack is basically the trademarkless codename of Quake III Team Arena game code and since we've completed the minimal essential assets for it in this version it's 'playable' to the extent where you can score points in Harvester, Overload and One Flag CTF nicely. Among the game types is the 'annoying voice system...

Surt's goblin Surt contributed the first model to OpenDungeons (and it looks good!) The model also was quickly incorporated by Timong into jClassicRPG . Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb ) released the first version of Choria , which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest . Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux! RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :) The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ). lalalove at dusmania Part of the dusmania was a overnight games creation 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...

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music . The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. Whatever it will turn out to be, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :) Last post I told you about Ardentryst . There's a mute gameplay video , I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it. Bear Factory A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games . l-echo , ...

Radakan 's devs have decided to use the jME aka jMonkeyEngine , just like JCRPG does! Neat! I admit that I was expecting the project to evaporate, it just had too pretty a website and some team member was very concerned with picking the right wiki and installing a flash audio player on the site, while there was nothing of the game in sight. (I also was afraid the team would come up with some idea like " Hey, let's make our own 3D engine! Right? ") I'm glad I seem to be wrong, the first tech demo video has been uploaded. (I'm not sure if that's not just some engine-bundled terrain and model, but even if it is, what the hell! They're grappling with it! Enough proof of interest and engagement for me!) I just hope they won't let the plans for game story get in the development's way. But I might be wrong worrying about that - Radakan is a "single-player sandbox 3D RPG". Sounds like something that is free of the bug feature "storyl...

New art for Adonthell There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash , an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".) Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions , the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo . Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games si...

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...

Open Football Open World Soccer Open Football development has resumed lately. I downloaded from svn and compiled, and whilst it's not a game yet, it looks very nice and the author clearly knows his stuff if you see the planning and structure that is going into e.g. the animation side of things. Still, if you are a soccer fan and want an ace 3D football game then get in touch the project . Open World Soccer , a Sensible Soccer inspired game and the successor to Yoda Soccer (which required the proprietary Blitz Basic), is also starting to take shape. Whilst not yet playable, it's not far away from a playable demo release according to the developer. JCRPG has a new " contributionary release " which introduces a very nice UI as well as a few other world features. What has been, up until now, just a framework is now starting to morph into a game. Not to be outdone by Teewars which has recently exploded onto the 2D deathmatch scene, the OpenLierox team have been h...

Battle for Wesnoth Well the big release of the weekend is Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 ( changelog ). Not too much to say about this game that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. It's simply the best open source game project going. Hundreds of contributors, graphics rivalling contemporary commercial 2D games. Over version 1.2, Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 brings 7 new campaigns, major UI improvements, major multiplayer improvements, many improved graphics (the portraits are stunning) and many bug and balance fixes. Wesnoth is so popular that the response to this release seems to have overwhelmed parts of their website. The wiki and forums are unable to cope. I'm wondering where they will draw the line with this project though. The main developer has since moved on to SilverTreeRPG . Obviously they could keep adding campaigns, refining the graphics etc, but surely at some point you want to say "this is it, this is the final v1 of Wesnoth" and look at making v2 w...