Gaming Daily A-Z

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge . It is basically a fork of Tesseract , which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine. The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua . Read about their progress on the latest beta here , which also includes this nice video showcasing the new player model and an test map:

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

(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!

While the recent new release of Cube2: Sauerbraten didn't bring any really big changes, the network of friendly forks keeps expanding. But before I go into more details, here is a new feature trailer of Cube2: Sauerbraten: The maybe most prominent and fully FOSS fork RedEclipse is still working on the promised new 1.4 release, with them doing some silly and some cool enhancement projects in the meantime... so yeah: Red Eclipse in Valve Time tm Octaforge still has a few day to go in order to avoid missing their estimated release "this month", but when browsing OpenGameArt.org, I came across an interesting fork of the Sandbox Game Maker fork, called Lamiae with the RPG game Kelgar : Kelgar Gameplay 0.8 - Indie DB According to their github page, content seems to be libre (CC-by or CC-by-SA) but information is a bit scarce. Even less information is available for this other fork, called SabiCube , but you can download and test their alpha. Oh and a bit older, but also ...

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