Gaming Daily A-Z

We have previously mentioned OpenXcom on several occasions before, but now the massive UFO: Enemy Unknown engine reimplementation project finally hit the long-awaited 1.0 mark, and they decided to celebrate by releasing this lovely trailer that sums up quite well the insane amount of detail and improvement put into the project over the course of 4 years. I'll let it do justice by itself, but not without thanking all the contributors for raising one of the most acclaimed DOS-era strategy classics from the stagnating swamps of buggy unsupported legacy releases and platform incompatibility. On a final note, the engine is, of course, free-as-in-freedom, though it relies on original game data of proprietary nature. You can download OpenXcom here , and buy an affordable digital copy of the original game on Steam, or somewhere around the web. Code License: GPLv3 Assets License: Relies on original proprietary data files. All new original art assets included in the OXC package available ...

This is a guest post by user Hythlodaeus, discussing GPLed video game engine reimplementations, and presenting several projects related to the topic. I thought I should take some time to discuss in detail one form of project that has been sometimes featured here, on  FreeGamer , and is generally quite popular in the FLOSS gaming world: engine rebuilds / re-implementations. Rather than being wholly original projects or Intellectual Property-free clones of more popular games, engine rebuilds (also known colloquially as “engine clones”) are essentially an attempt to completely reconstruct and improve upon the features of a given original game, without going trough the trouble or replacing original game art assets and without creating a new whole, free-of-restrictions and copyrights IP. Thus, engine rebuilds merely reproduce the rules, mechanics, and game logic of the original game, while still being dependent on some other form of original data. Thes...

One of the FOSS projects I really hold dear (mainly because they chose to include a few models made by myself :p ) is UFO:AI . For those totally out of the loop: it's a turn based strategy game based on the classic game X-Com utilizing an improved Quake2 engine. Recently they had a new release, version 2.4 , but the changes upcoming are even cooler (new soldier models and a greatly improved GUI): More cool screens of those upcoming changes can be found here and here . And here you can find some more as part of a slightly older, but still interesting interview with the developers. Besides these development news, there seems to have been an informal competition of who can do the nicer Let's Play videos of UFO:AI ;) FrontFox's UFO:AI Let's Play video part1 Click here for Part 2 and Part 3 , or check out this series of Let's Play videos as the alternative: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 (Part 1 starts out with an outdated version though). So if you are hooked now by this aw...

Yes, I post only seldom, but when I do it I keep up the good old tradition of mixing totally unrelated projects in one big post :p So where to start today? Ahh yes: The puzzle type game Berusky 2 was recently FOSSified (code and art GPL) as pointed out in our forums (but I have to admit I saw it first on LGDB ). And as out great founder was quick to point out , it follows the great tradition of the first part with was also released under the terms of the GPL. In totally unrelated news, Lips of Suna version 0.5 got released last week, with a bunch of nice graphical and game-play improvements ( change log and discussion here ). For those living behind a rock, Lips of Suna is a crazy mix of Minecraft, slightly adult themed anime and a more classic RPG. Definitly worth a try, even though still under heavy development! Hmm and now a quick run-down of other (I'd say less important) news: Q3 Rally (now stand alone with the ioQuake3 engine) is nearing another release and OpenXcom is ...