Gaming Daily A-Z

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...

Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed... however that was never officially announced until now: This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools… Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don’t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers. Whats more, the code is available… Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any ...

So... you might have followed the lengthy discussion in the comment section of this blog entry of mine from last week... if you didn't don't worry you didn't miss anything important :p However I was corrected in quite a few things (besides all the disagreements), so I though it would be good to post a sort of "counter statement" to clear up some recent mess-ups by me: First of all, the developers from Q2W informed us that in fact most ( but not all ) of their art assets are CC-by-SA or GPL, which is great. They have also released a Linux installer now, so feel free to check it out if you are gaming on this platform (like me). Oh and I have also updated the video to a newer one, in case you didn't notice yet. Also, and I am to be honest quite surprised by this, OverDose does in fact have an open source-code repository since some time now, where you can download the source to the engine and some of the cool in-house tools they have developed. No clearly vis...

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news! And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2). The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World , which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta , which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet). Edit: Updated to newer video But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well). So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar: AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements : What's new in AlienArena Ya3dag , also released a new version recently and I s...

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK. So, where to start? Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown , which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates , a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself: Octaspire:Crates Tutorial A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare) , which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world". If you are following the development of the p...

Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking... and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games! For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome ;) Further more the UFO:AI team is making some great progress after their highly acclaimed 2.3 release two months ago. Besides a a lot smaller changes, various new sounds have been added since then and the rockets got a nice new explosion effect: Kaaaboom! Oh and maybe this is of interest for some of you (personally I never really understood the need for it though): War§ow can now be played in a browser window via a Firefox plugin! Check out their development blog for more details. Yet another 3D adventure game A rather interesting Project I was unaware of until recently is Ya3Dag . It has quite a lot of rather unique features not found in any of the other Qua...

OverDose is pretty What is OverDose ? Edit: correct link OverDose is a Multiplayer team objective based game with online and offline play. Two sides, Earths Confederate Marine Corps. and the evil alien Marauders, battle for control of locations on Earth. Based in a first person, the two conflicting teams must battle not only each other, but large open terrain areas. Every class has his own strong and weak points, but every class is a vital role to the game. On a technical front, it uses a highly evolved Quake II iD tech 2 engine which renders better than Doom 3 iD tech 4, as evidenced by this video and that video . The gameplay sounds quite good too. FlightGear FlightGear 1.9.0 got released. The actual announcement is buried in the mailing list. (For those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, the Sourceforge list archives are about as user unfriendly as you'll find, so you should appreciate me having found it! This release is a major overhaul of the graphics code,...