Gaming Daily A-Z

*hrmmpf* New FreeOrion 0.43 release . Unvanquished Alpha 18 . Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake . Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again. OpenMW 0.25.0 released. New Ya3dag 1.42 release. Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0. tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

Ok I admit it... I am a bit of a 0 A.D. fanboy! But the new Alpha 13 release is also great again, and deserved an update post: Also pretty cool is the new OpenMW 0.22 release , that finally features player and NPC animations, and thus starts to look more like a functioning game: Other unrelated news: To progress on their standalone version, the developers of The Dark Mod are looking for support in their sound department mostly. That non-stop programmer "TheDushan" has started porting the Torque3D engine to Linux . Pretty amazing progress if you ask me :) Julius out!

Physica screenshots Let's play Physica - a hard casual platformer game played on Linux Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down. SkyRiot screens SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play  and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [ forum post ]. SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps. OpenMW v0.21.0 Commentary OpenMW  0.21.0 has been released. Changelog: Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements Torch flickering improved to better match vanil...

video:  OpenMW v. 0.17.0 Commentary The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind  brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0. Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite . A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game? The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it. The project uses the "Release early and often" mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon. If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum . An editor for OpenMW! The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn't...

So my recent rant resulted in a lively discussion about ARPGs, but sadly not really in any contributions or new contributors for Summoning Wars so far... but maybe that was too much to hope for ;) Anyways, another project I mentioned was just recently updated: Lips of Suna is now available as Version 0.6 ( release notes on our forums ) and this release marks the first official release with OGRE3D as the rendering engine. In my rant I dissed that rendering engine a bit due to the lack of good content creation tools (yes I know, not their focus or intention), but at least here it seems to have been put to a good use. In somewhat unrelated news, there is also a new version of OpenMW , which is continuing at their current fast pace to reimplement that well known RPG. Change-log can be also found in our forums .

OpenMW 0.14 has been released [ blog announcement ] half a month ago. I'm a fan of commented video changelogs and highly recommend theirs  (embedded below)! As an experiment, I created an audio-only version [ogg Vorbis, 4m12s, 3M] using youtube-dl, ffmpeg and sox, in case you prefer that over YouTube. video: OpenMW 0.14 Commented Changelog

Normally qubodup is responsible for this type of games (I have to admit, never liked Morrowind, nor any predecessors or sequels), but since they are doing such a good job of promoting it (and Q is busy), so I will give them their desired news: The OpenMW developers have just released our latest version of OpenMW. I was hoping you could post on Freegamer. Below is our message, feel free to put your own spin on it. Also it looks like the Arx Liberatis folks are almost ready to release their 1.0. Thanks! OpenMW 0.13.0 trailer Hot on the heels of 0.12.0, the OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.13.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA . Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page . This release notably includes functional NPC dialogue, and beautiful sky! There is a great new demonstration video for 0.13.0 up YouTube channel and a new video showing off our improved physics implementation which is schedul...

image: Sky in OpenMW (scheduled for 0.13) OpenMW 0.12 has been released: This release notably includes NPC and Creature animation, though no A.I. has been implemented, so animations must be activated through console commands. Please review the following: Regressions: Sounds other than music not working Scroll and button background graphics in launcher not working in Linux package Important notes: You must remove all old openmw.cfg files in order for the automatic detection of Morrowind installations to work. If the data path is set manually and it contains spaces, it needs to be put inside quotation marks. Changelog: Various rendering fixes and optimizations Refactored engine class Automatic package building Various build fixes and cleanup Various configuration fixes and cleanup, including detection of existing Morrowind installations Basic NPC/Creature animation support added, must be activated from console Basic implementation of Journal Window added Fix for local scripts continuing...

Hey Freegamers,  My name is Antoine and I’ve been a devotee of this site and the Linux Game Tome for years. Now I have the priviledge to contribute back an article. Thank you qubodup for helping me out with this article. I love open source games, but I have a particular soft spot for those that allow creativity and collaboration from their users. Imagine if there existed an open source, and therefore completely editable, game engine with as much content as Morrowind’s fans have created available for it? As many of you are aware, there are currently fan projects working to extend the life, reach, and functionality of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind far beyond what’s possible using Bethesda’s Construction Set modding tools. Can you guess which screen is rendered by what engine? :) About Morrowind: Morrowind is an enormous proprietary game loved by fans for its atmospheric and immersive world filled with bizarre giant mushrooms, homes built into giant vines, and barren wastelands....

[video: OpenMW 0.10.0 Change Log ] OpenMW has been steadily reporting about latest progress on their blog and now also released some video change logs with audio commentary. Freedroid is another project that has been reporting their progress regularly. You can follow them and many more projects on our game planet or dev planet. To me, short video commentary reports of progress are a delight. While it might be ineffective to make a video for each release, if the changes are not so many and the effort is high, but from time to time having a video change log might be better at getting players interested or developers impressed enough to contribute than a simple CHANGES.txt. An interesting middle ground is what M.A.R.S. did for their last few releases: screenshot changelogs. GLC is one of the two nice ways I use to record game videos - here STK When it comes to gameplay video recording on Linux, I spent some time on the subject and for me it all boiled down to two methods: GLC is ideal...

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one. OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too. Alex the Allegator  was part-ported to HTML5  using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D DusteD , maker of Wizznic! is not dead . Blendswap  now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying. Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS . Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

OpenMW 0.9 is now available for download . Features: Exterior cells - loading, unloading and management Character Creation GUI Character creation Make cell names case insensitive when doing internal lookups Music player NPCs rendering No screenshots I'm afraid! DH concept art from the " clothing the Estonian " thread DungeonHack will have a new software architecture [ git repo ], estimated to be showcased very soon. [ announcement ] I noticed that both projects have a "Contributions Wanted" link which leads to their milestone/roadmap tickets (on a wiki page) [ dh / owm ]. I get the feeling it's time to start using trac, as does PARPG for example . :)

OpenMW has released 0.9.0 ! For those that don't know, OpenMW is a project to write an entire 3d rpg engine from scratch , made compatible with Morrowind data formats (other formats can be added later) with the noble intention of setting the first target at being feature complete with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. And after that's achieved? "Ideas include multiplayer, improved graphics and animation, improved scripting and more flexible modding, a new editor, or moving on to Oblivion and other games"   sayeth their roadmap making them one of the most potential brimming opensource projects around. Basically at 1.0: All Morrowind mods will be compatible Total conversions that do not use Bethesda art or recreate them, will be totally FOSS, (0$ for people who've never brought Morrowind). Non-total conversions need the retail copy. Modder rage inducing technical restrictions/bugs removed, improved modability/interface (of the type that caused Tolkien b...

A very interesting development that I picked up thanks to LGDB is the Open Imperium Galactica project .  Another open source clone of a proprietary game, Open-IG doesn't require external datafiles to be played; it comes with a launcher which downloads all necessary files for you. It has a rather wide variety of gameplay, from 4x galaxy management, to city-building, to rts battles in space and on land. A very cool game and definitely a project to watch.

Crystal Space 1.4 is out. Features include improved animations ("integrating vertex based animation with skeletal animation") and terrain ("improves rendering and handling of large outdoor areas"), OpenAL for sound and an internationalization plug-in. Engine screenshots are very informative. This is Panda3D by the way. Panda3D has a prettier website, it released version 1.7.0 and apparently has a web-plug in . The new version makes it easier to crash the computer, but also gives a performance boost - with the magic of ' pointer textures '. I have a little crush on Panda3D, because it gives access to 3D and audio with no complicated setting up through a scripting language (Python). On the other hand it requires 3D models to be in its own format and I find converting not very convenient. For example there have been problems importing animations into Radakan . OGRE mascot Ogre has a mascot , and it might even become freely licensed, somebody just needs to c...

Early OpenMW GUI implementation OpenMW is a re-implementation of the (non-free) TES3 Morrowind game engine, written in the D programming language. The engine makes use of OGRE and other open source libraries , features an own scripting language called "Monster" and the latest release has the version number 0.6. Out of curiosity, I asked Nicolay Korslund (the lead developer) one year ago what his motivation for writing OpenMW was. Later I decided to ask some more and now you can finally read the interview, in which Nicolay tells us about Git , OpenMW's development and whether or not to expect original games as a result of the OpenMW project. The interview Q1: What is your motivation for writing OpenMW? Initially the project was started a few years ago (somewhere around 2004-2005, don't remember exactly), out from desire to improve a game I loved and from frustration with bugs and issues that made it less fun than it could be. Having been a programmer for about a de...

There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI , the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.) Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though. FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved. Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced...

Word War vi 0.24 Word War vi is now downloadable as version 0.24 . I'm having an awfully great time playing it (even if it took me some months to finally get over myself and resolve some dependency problems at first). I especially like how I can use my xbox 360 controller for playing and how it's rumble function is used. Word War vi is the most high-tech retro arcade shooter you can get your hands on right now. One super thing about it is that development and tweaking is being influenced by player criticism a lot. So for posting feedback on the game, use this thread . Daggerwind Scrolls Daggerwind Scrolls is a traditional 1st/3rd person CRPG dungeon crawl game written using C# for Mac OS X. Its a fan based project inspired by 'The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall', Bethesda Softworks 1994. I haven't given it a try (and won't do as long as there are no for-*nix instructions). I now count four bigger The Elder Scrolls-related open source projects: Daggerwind Scrolls an...

OGRE 1.6.0 aka Shoggoth is the newest version of the acclaimed 3D engine. I don't understand anything that's on the changelog , but it obviously goes beyond bugfixing and tweaking. :) There are no recent pre-compiled packages available, so the source way is the way to go, for now. The Infinity Engine's clone GemRB had some DONE s added to it's TODO , when version 0.3.1 was released a month ago. OpenMW , an OGRE-based engine for TES3 's game data, is now 0.5-versioned. Considering that the project started in this year's june, this number is quite impressive! Does this mean that we will have a final version of OpenMW by the start of 2009's summer? :D However, animations, interaction and user interface are not yet implemented. Also: check out these videos that show the progress of the engine so far. cocos2d-iphone is yet another LGPL-ed game framework and you can probably guess the platform it's designed for :). However, freedom freaks will argue t...