Gaming Daily A-Z

I'm a big advocate of the phrase, "Release Early, Release Often." I think it is by far the best way to keep or gain community interest in a project. Of course, that simple phrase doesn't quite sum up what you actually must do - simply uploading a release and announcing it on your mailing list is unlikely to attract interest. For example, who knew about Lincity-NG 2.9beta in lieu of the intended Lincity-NG 3.0 ? Lincity-NG is in a bit of a mini-crisis. A victim of the shutdown of the Berlios developer services , all the web material is in a bit of a mess. Its home page is now on fedorahosted.org but still links back to the defunct Berlios page. There are entries on Google Code and Github that are up to date with the source, as well as an imported Sourceforge project * which is the only place you can currently find the beta , however all are unofficial / back up for now. (* Not to be confused with this redundant redundant project ) Another game project which suffer...

Welcome to a Free Gamer special! People often accuse the Free software and open source game sphere of lacking depth, that there are few good games. In 2009 Free Gamer is dedicated to dispelling this myth. As part of a series of articles on specific genres, highlighting the games that people develop for the love of development in order for us to play, I humbly present a set of reviews of open source city building and tycoon games. I try to be fair and critical, and I note that these games are all enjoyable in their own way. They are all certainly worth a look. OpenTTD OpenTTD I started with OpenTTD 0.6.3 - being the only formerly commercial game I'm covering today, it is good a metric for the others. Still, it is not quite Free software, you need the abandonware Transport Tycoon Deluxe to run it. The community has been working on a project called OpenGFX to create both drop-in and high-resolution graphics to replace the proprietary materials. They are getting there, but I ...

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 ...

In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview. Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-) Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q. Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?" My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy Q. And what do you do for a ...

A nice suprise today with major updates to two games that I'd have expected to fall into the common void of obscurity that engulfs most inactive FOSS games. Open Outcast made their inaugral release, the culmination of 3 years of work on the project. So go grab their first tech demo and see what all the fuss is about. :-) Also it seems Crown & Cutlass is veering back on course; there's a [fairly new] developer blog showing plenty of development activity. They are busy rewriting the game, taking into account the usual lessons learnt when programming significant software like a game, so hopefully this visible activity will result in an update for us to marvel at and enjoy. Finally there's the 1.1.0 release of Lincity-NG , which doesn't seem to have major changes but should bring with it the usual incremental improvements FOSS game updates enjoy. Back to my holiday. :-)